The Two Destinies

I stopped in irrepressible astonishment. We had walked by this time nearly as far on the way back to the city as the old Palace of Holyrood. My companion, after a glance at me, turned and looked at the rugged old building, mellowed into quiet beauty by the lovely moonlight.

"This is my fa vorite walk," she said, simply, "since I have been in Edinburgh. I don't mind the loneliness. I like the perfect tranquillity here at night." She glanced at me again. "What is the matter?" she asked. "You say nothing; you only look at me."

"I want to hear more of your dream," I said. "How did you come to be sleeping in the daytime?"

"It is not easy to say what I was doing," she replied, as we walked on again. "I was miserably anxious and ill. I felt my helpless condition keenly on that day. It was dinner-time, I remember, and I had no appetite. I went upstairs (at the inn where I am staying), and lay down, quite worn out, on my bed. I don't know whether I fainted or whether I slept; I lost all consciousness of what was going on about me, and I got some other consciousness in its place. If this was dreaming, I can only say it was the most vivid dream I ever had in my life."

"Did it begin by your seeing me?" I inquired.

"It began by my seeing your drawing-book--lying open on a table in a summer-house."

"Can you describe the summer-house as you saw it?"

She described not only the summer-house, but the view of the waterfall from the door. She knew the size, she knew the binding, of my sketch-book--locked up in my desk, at that moment, at home in Perthshire!

"And you wrote in the book," I went on. "Do you remember what you wrote?"

She looked away from me confusedly, as if she were ashamed to recall this part of her dream.

"You have mentioned it already," she said. There is no need for me to go over the words again. Tell me one thing--when you were at the summer-house, did you wait a little on the path to the door before you went in?"

I had waited, surprised by my first view of the woman writing in my book. Having answered her to this effect, I asked what she had done or dreamed of doing at the later moment when I entered the summer-house.

"I did the strangest things," she said, in low, wondering tones. "If you had been my brother, I could hardly have treated you more familiarly. I beckoned to you to come to me. I even laid my hand on your bosom. I spoke to you as I might have spoken to my oldest and dearest friend. I said, 'Remember me. Come to me.' Oh, I was so ashamed of myself when I came to my senses again, and recollected it. Was there ever such familiarity--even in a dream--between a woman and a man whom she had only once seen, and then as a perfect stranger?"