Page:The cream of the jest; a comedy of evasions (IA creamofjestcomed00caberich).pdf/139

 Sometimes they would be alone in places which he did not recognize, sometimes they would be living, under the Stuarts or the Valois or the Cæsars, or other dynasties long since unkingdomed, human lives whose obligations and imbroglios affected Horvendile and Ettarre to much that half-serious concern with which one follows the action of a romance or a well-acted play; for it was perfectly understood between Horvendile and Ettarre that they were involved in the affairs of a dream.

Ettarre seemed to remember nothing of the happenings Kennaston had invented in his book. And Guiron and Maugis d'Aigremont and Count Emmerick and the other people in The Audit at Storisende—once more to give ''Men Who Loved Alison'' its original title—were names that rang familiar to her somehow, she confessed, but without her knowing why. And so, Kennaston came at last to comprehend that perhaps the Ettarre he loved was not the heroine of his book inexplicably vivified; but, rather, that in the book he had, just as inexplicably, drawn a blurred portrait of the Ettarre he loved, that ageless lovable and loving woman of whom all poets had been granted fitful