Page:Adams - A Child of the Age.djvu/178

166 night of our lives, this. It is the night of all eternity for us. Come! quickly!' (She was looking at me with dilated, almost sightless eyes, opened breathless mouth, beatless heart. I did not know where we were—in heaven, in hell, in the earth, with sea around us, in life, in death, in eternity.)

'Are you ill, Bertram } ' she said. 'What is the matter?' I half threw myself back in the chair with something that partook of smile and laugh and was neither smile nor laugh. She knew nothing! A phantasy! A pure phantasy! Then:

'Nothing is the matter with me,' I said, 'now. I suffer from my eyes occasionally.' I rose. ' Really, I am afraid I must be saying good-night,' I said, 'I' I looked at her.

'Whither away so fast?' I thought; 'are you so sure, oh wiseacre, that she knew, knows nothing? She knew! She knows!' Then I thought: 'Shall I pass it over in silence? Shall I say anything of sorrow for it? No. I am not sorry for it!—''My dream? My dream in Paris?… "I rose and crossed over the stone bridge: came to behind the carriage and began climbing over it from the back. The lady turned and, seeing me, put out her brown-gloved hand to me; and then, when I would have caught and pressed it into my bosom, touched my chest with her finger-tips, the carnage moved.… ''

For a moment a superstitious feeling all but possessed me. Then I cried to myself that, at this rate, I might as well become a clairvoyant, or an augurer, or a fool.—I looked at her again. (It was not more than four seconds perhaps since I had looked at her before.)

I said:

'I did wrong. I ask pardon.'

I left her. I passed across the room and through the door and down, and, as one in a day-dream does the things that his body remembers but his soul forgets, took hat and coat and passed out into the night. I went on.

Then the thought came:

What, was it done? Was it really done? Was I not in that room with them and was not this a dream?