She threw a long cloak round her, noiselessly lit a candle, and crept out of the room. There was no sound anywhere, save the quick patter of her own feet on the stairs, and the rapid scurry of a mouse flying from the light. Betty reached the parlour, set down her candle, and faced the window, over which the curtain had been drawn again. Now, under all the circumstances, it is probable that ninety-nine people out of a hundred would have hesitated, at that hour, to draw back that curtain; and the hundredth would have done it—if at all—out of sheer bravado. But the curious thing was, that Betty had no fear of it at all; so completely was she dominated by her dream, and so much did she seem to be dreaming still, that she walked up to the curtain, and softly drew it aside. Nor did she think it strange, under the circumstances, that there was a face upon the other side; for, although she believed she looked upon Dandy Chater, somehow the dream face had got mixed up with it; the dream-eyes of the child she believed dead smiled at her, out of the face of the man. Still keeping her eyes upon the window, she slipped along to the door and softly drew the bolt, and opened it; and then—for no known reason, and yet for some reason which seemed strong within her—began to tremble very much, as though she faced something uncanny. A figure moved towards the door, slipped into the room, and took her in his arms. Not Dandy Chater—not the man with a price on his head, and blood on his cruel hands—not the man whose name was a by-word and a reproach in all that countryside; but her boy—her dear lad, back from his grave thousands of miles away! You couldn’t have tried to deceive old Betty Siggs at that moment; she knew that no other arms could hold her like that. Then, when he called her—as he had done all those long years before—“little mother”—when he whispered, did she remember Tallapoona Farm, and the mare with the rat-tail, and Peter the sheep-dog—and a dozen other things that would have stamped him as her boy, if nothing else could have done; old Betty woke from her dream, and burst into a flood of tears, and laid her old grey head down on his shoulder. Perhaps it was well that Toby was sleeping soundly above. For, if _he_ had happened to dream, and had wandered, in his night apparel, down to that same parlour, he would have been very properly scandalised. For here was the supposed Dandy Chater, sitting near the table, with Betty Siggs—(hugging him mighty tight round the neck)—on his knee—the while he rapidly sketched out all that happened in those eighteen years.