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94 The grandfather's house and garden—the stately, white-haired grandfather, whom they called My Lord, and who was, it seemed, the aunt's father—the banquet, the picture-gallery, the gardens lit up by little coloured oil lamps hung in festoons from tree to tree, the blazing torches, the music, the Masque—a sort of play without words in which every one wore the most wonderful and beautiful dresses, and the Queen herself took a part dressed all in gauze and jewels and white swan's feathers—all these things were like a dream to Dickie, and through it all the words kept on saying themselves to him very gently, very quietly, and quite without stopping—

"Gravesend. That's where the lodging-house is where Beale is waiting for you—the man you called father. You promised to go there as soon as you could. Why haven't you gone? Gravesend. That's where the lodging-house is where Beale" And so on, over and over again.

And how can any one enjoy anything when this sort of thing keeps on saying itself under and over and through and between everything he sees and hears and feels and thinks? And the worst of it was that now, for the first time since he had found that he was not lame, he felt—more than felt, he knew—that the old New Cross life had not been a fever dream, and that Beale, who had been kind to him and taken him through the pleasant country and slept with him in the bed with the green curtains, was really waiting for him at Gravesend.