He followed with other yet more awful words which I never could recall. I only remember the feeling of horror and amazement they left behind. I turned to Charley. He had disappeared, and I found myself lying in the bed beside Mr Osborne. I gave a great cry of dismay--when there was Charley again beside me, saying, ‘What’s the matter, Wilfrid? Wake up. My father’s not here.’ I did wake, but until I had felt in the bed I could not satisfy myself that Mr Osborne was indeed not there. ‘You’ve been talking in your sleep. I could hardly get you waked,’ said Charley, who stood there in his shirt. ‘Oh Charley!’ I cried, ‘I’ve had such a dream!’ ‘What was it, Wilfrid?’ ‘Oh! I can’t talk about it yet,’ I answered. I never did tell him that dream; for even then I was often uneasy about him--he was so sensitive. The affections of my friend were as hoops of steel; his feelings a breath would ripple. Oh, my Charley! if ever we meet in that land so vaguely shadowed in my dream, will you not know that I loved you heartily well? Shall I not hasten’ to lay bare my heart before you--the priest of its confessional? Oh, Charley! when the truth is known, the false will fly asunder as the Autumn leaves in the wind; but the true, whatever their faults, will only draw together the more tenderly that they have sinned against each other. CHAPTER XXI. THE FROZEN STREAM. Before the Winter arrived, I was well, and Charley had recovered from the fatigue of watching me. One holiday, he and I set out alone to accomplish a scheme we had cherished from the first appearance of the frost. How it arose I hardly remember; I think it came of some remark Mr Forest had made concerning the difference between the streams of Switzerland and England--those in the former country being emptiest, those in the latter fullest in the Winter. It was--when the frost should have bound up the sources of the beck which ran almost by our door, and it was no longer a stream, but a rope of ice--to take that rope for our guide, and follow it as far as we could towards the secret recesses of its Summer birth. Along the banks of the stream, we followed it up and up, meeting a varied loveliness which it would take the soul of a Wordsworth or a Ruskin to comprehend or express. To my poor faculty the splendour of the ice-crystals remains the one memorial thing. In those lonely water-courses the sun was gloriously busy, with none to praise him except Charley and me.