In the dream, oddly enough, she had been walking through these same woods. Here and there she had seen a bright leaf blowing; she had heard her own footsteps on the brittle leaves beneath; a slender shaft of sunlight--the last of the day--had stolen downward and touched her like a long finger. Then, suddenly, the golden finger had withdrawn and the dusk had fallen, not gradually, but in swift, downward billows of mist that flooded upon her and blinded her. She had closed her eyes against them for a moment, and when she opened them again, the mist had disappeared, leaving her in a space of clear gray light. Through this light some one had come toward her, a shape at first vague and ethereal, as if it were a lingering spirit of the mist, but gathering substance and definite outline as it advanced until it became the figure of a woman with arms that reached toward her for embrace. Involuntarily Sheila's own arms had reached forth in answer; she had taken a stumbling step forward; through the pale light there had glimmered on her, for an instant of revelation, the shadow's face. _And she had wakened with the cry: "Mother!"_ A strange dream, especially for a little girl whose mother had died soon after her birth. But that dead mother had always been a dear familiar of Sheila's thoughts; her picture had been like a living companion. And though the sleeping vision of her had driven the child, startled to the very soul, to her grandmother's bed, now, as she trod the woods that had been the scene of the dream-miracle, she remembered it without fear. "What if, after all, dreams sometimes came true?" The thought quickened her breath, but not her feet. In the night she had fled from a dream too poignant, but now she felt no impulse for flight. Rather, she delayed her steps, thrilling as she recognized about her the dream's landmarks. For now there arose before Sheila's dazed eyes that rare and marvellous phenomenon of a dream reproduced, at least in its physical aspects, by reality. And in such an experience, given perhaps to one in a thousand, it is the reality that seems to tremble--threatened by some older and stronger truth--beneath one's feet. So it trembled now for Sheila as she saw again those features in the face of the woods that had impressed her sleep. Here were the few rich leaves, fluttering lightly in the evening wind as they had fluttered in her dreaming vision of them! And now her heart fluttered with them, so much stranger than the dream itself was its incredible repetition. There--just ahead--yes, surely! there was the same long finger of pale sunlight striking downward through the stripped trees! Presently she would pass beneath its touch, feeling it faintly warm upon her cheek--as she had felt it in her dream! Afterwards would be the dusk. And then--_what if dreams came true_? She was not afraid, but instinctively she drew nearer the boy beside her. "Ted," she breathed, in an awed whisper.