“It was all just as we thought,” Mattie was saying again,--“only a deal bigger.” She had forgotten her tea, for the time being, and her gaze at the quilt seemed not so much to be seeing pictures upon it as to pierce through it and beyond. “There was that much room,--more room than I’d ever thought there was in the whole world! Even the sky seemed bigger and higher than our sky over here.” She drew a deep breath, as if even in imagination it was a delight to fill her lungs under that higher and wider sky.... “The children were there and all,” she went on, after a pause, her voice softening. “You’ll hardly believe it, but I knew ’em as well as well, even though I’ve never seen no more of ’em than just their photos! There was Luke’s Joe, and Joe’s Luke, and little Sally, and Daisy May; little Eric, too ... and Maggie’s last, as hasn’t done as well as it should.... I couldn’t have known them better if I’d brought them up myself! And the queerest thing of all was that they knew _me_!... Just before I woke up I told ’em I’d got to go, and they set to and cried fit to break their hearts.” “It was only a dream,” he tried to console her, speaking with an effort as if from a great distance. “Yes, but it wasn’t like dreaming; it was like _being_!” she said quickly, and suddenly her eyes filled with tears. “It was _that_ real!” He came back then from his leap across the ocean, and, reaching out his hand, patted her on the shoulder. “It’ll be real enough soon,” he reminded her gently. “It’s only a matter of being patient a few weeks more.” “Only a few weeks, that’s all,” she repeated after him in a curiously childlike fashion, heartening herself both with the words and with a sip of the cooling tea. “But it’s a long while, all the same.... Seems strange, doesn’t it, you should feel as if you couldn’t wait a few more weeks, when you’ve waited for years and years?” “You won’t notice you’re waiting,” he pointed out. “You’ll be too busy. There’ll be a deal to do.” She brightened at that, her vitality mounting at the very thought of the approaching period of activity. “Ay, and I’m keen to be at it!” she retorted briskly. “I shan’t feel it’s really real until I begin to pack!” She was launched now upon a subject of which the possibilities were endless, and was already deep in its details when the same whistled snatch reached them which Kirkby had heard earlier from the park. He moved automatically. “There’s the men. I must be off,” he said, turning towards the door. Mattie nodded, her mind still full of delightful problems. “It’s time we were both moving,” she agreed, though vaguely. “I’m late this morning.... It’s that dream, I suppose,” she added, passing her hand over her eyes as if to remove something which still lingered before them, “but I don’t rightly feel as if I was back!” “Oh, you’re back, right enough!” he smiled at her from the door; and at the words the thing which had stayed in front of her eyes fled, and she looked across at him.