THE HOUSE OF DREAMS-COME-TRUE By Margaret Pedler Grosset & Dunlap Publishers,New York 1919 [Illustration: 0001] [Illustration: 0007] It’s a strange road leads to the House of Dreams, To the House of Dreams-Come-True, Its hills are steep and its valleys deep, And salt with tears the Wayfarers weep, The Wayfarers--I and you. But there’s sure a way to the House of Dreams, To the House of Dreams-Come-True. We shall find it yet, ere the sun has set, If we fare straight on, come fine, come wet, Wayfarers--I and you. Margaret Pedler. Note:--Musical setting by Harold Pincott. Published by Edward Schubert & Co., 11 East Sand Street, New York. THE HOUSE OF DREAMS-COME-TRUE CHAPTER I--THE WANDER-FEVER THE great spaces of the hall seemed to slope away into impenetrable gloom; velvet darkness deepening imperceptibly into sable density of panelled wall; huge, smoke-blackened beams, stretching wide arms across the roof, showing only as a dim lattice-work of ebony, fretting the shadowy twilight overhead. At the furthermost end, like a giant golden eye winking sleepily through the dark, smouldered a fire of logs, and near this, in the luminous circle of its warmth, a man and woman were seated at a table lit by tall wax candles in branched candlesticks. With its twinkling points of light, and the fire’s red glow quivering across its shining surface, the table gleamed out like a jewel in a sombre setting--a vivid splash of light in the grey immensity of dusk-enfolded hall. Dinner was evidently just over, for the candlelight shone softly on satin-skinned fruit, while wonderful gold-veined glass flecked the dark pool of polished mahogany with delicate lines and ripples of opalescent colour. A silence had fallen on the two who had been dining. They had been gay enough together throughout the course of the meal, but, now that the servants had brought coffee and withdrawn, it seemed as though the stillness--that queer, ghostly, memory-haunted stillness which lurks in the dim, disused recesses of a place--had crept out from the four corners of the hall and were stealing upon them, little by little, as the tide encroaches on the shore, till it had lapped them round in a curious atmosphere of oppression. The woman acknowledged it by a restless twist of her slim shoulders. She was quite young--not more than twenty--and as she glanced half-enquiringly at the man seated opposite her there was sufficiency of likeness between the two to warrant the assumption that they were father and daughter.