The last of the sentence came so slowly that it sank almost into silence, as of one beginning a sentence and becoming so absorbed in the subject as to forget the speech. Then she turned again to the piano, as if to hide from her mother the sorrow which had crept into her face. "You should cease to think of that. Such things are dreams--at present we are confronted by very disagreeable realities." "Dreams--ah, mother mine"--she answered with forced cheeriness--"but what would life be without them?" "For one thing, Alice"--and she took the daughter's place at the piano and began to play snatches of an old waltz tune--"it would be free from all the morbid unnaturalness, the silliness, the froth of things. There is too much hardness in every life--in the world--in the very laws of life, for such things ever to have been part of the original plan. For my part, I think they are the product of man and wine or women or morphine or some other narcotic." "We make the dreams of life, but the realities of it make us," she added. "Oh, no, mother. 'Tis the dreams that make the realities. Not a great established fact exists but it was once the vision of a dreamer. Our dreams to-day become the realities of to-morrow." "Do you believe Tom is not dead--that he will one day come back?" asked her mother abruptly. It was twilight and the fire flickered, lighting up the library. But in the flash of it Mrs. Westmore saw Alice's cheek whiten in a hopeless, helpless, stricken way. Then she walked to the window and looked out on the darkness fast closing in on the lawn, clustering denser around the evergreens and creeping ghostlike toward the dim sky line which shone clear in the open. The very helplessness of her step, her silence, her numbed, yearning look across the lawn told Mrs. Westmore of the death of all hope there. She followed her daughter and put her arms impulsively around her. "I should not have hurt you so, Alice. I only wanted to show you how worse than useless it is ... but to change the subject, I do wish to speak to you of--our condition."