light there had glimmered on her, for an instant of revelation, the shadow's face.

And she had wakened with the cry: "Mother!"

A strange dream, especially for a little girl whose mother had died soon after her birth. But that dead mother had always been a dear familiar of Sheila's thoughts; her picture had been like a living companion. And though the sleeping vision of her had driven the child, startled to the very soul, to her grandmother's bed, now, as she trod the woods that had been the scene of the dream-miracle, she remembered it without fear.

"What if, after all, dreams sometimes came true?" The thought quickened her breath, but not her feet. In the night she had fled from a dream too poignant, but now she felt no impulse for flight. Rather, she delayed her steps, thrilling as she recognized about her the dream's landmarks.

For now there arose before Sheila's dazed eyes that rare and marvellous phenomenon of a dream reproduced, at least in its physical aspects, by reality. And in such an experience, given perhaps to one in a thousand, it is the reality that seems to tremble—threatened by some older and stronger truth—beneath one's feet. So it trembled now for Sheila as she saw again those features in the face of the woods that had impressed her sleep.

Here were the few rich leaves, fluttering lightly in the evening wind as they had fluttered in her dreaming vision of them! And now her heart fluttered with them, so much stranger than the dream itself was its incredible repetition.

There—just ahead—yes, surely! there was the same long finger of pale sunlight striking downward through the stripped trees! Presently she would pass beneath its touch, feeling it faintly warm upon her cheek—as she had felt it in her dream!

Afterwards would be the dusk. And then—what if dreams came true?

She was not afraid, but instinctively she drew nearer the boy beside her. "Ted," she breathed, in an awed whisper.

"Huh?" he asked, roused from his own silent well-being.

But she did not answer, and he strode cheerfully on without troubling himself to question her again. "What if dreams come true?" she was saying within herself, but she could not, after all, put the thought into words for Ted to scoff at.

And then, before she reached it, the finger of sunlight vanished and the dusk was upon her, not swiftly billowing, but slipping softly downward like a silken veil. She was not afraid, she told herself, but the dusk chilled her and she shivered.

After the dusk—if dreams came true!—would be— And then her heart seemed to stop its beating. For dim in the distance, but coming toward her through the trees, there walked a shadow. And even while she watched, it gathered shape and substance unto itself; it ceased to be a floating fragment of mist and became a woman!

But now Sheila's heart began to beat again—riotously. Her hesitations, her unacknowledged fears, were succeeded by a sense of exquisite exultation. The miracle was at hand—and she rushed upon it.

"Ted!" It was not a whisper this time, but a cry, and the boy turned sharply. But Sheila had already started forward, calling wildly: "Mother! Mother! Mother!"

And though the woman was still but a distant figure, she heard that piercing call and answered it with one as clear and passionate:

"My little girl! I'm coming! I'm coming!"

For an instant Ted stood motionless, struck to the earth by that simple horror of the unusual, the abnormal, which the very sane and unimaginative always feel. Then, with a single bound, he overtook Sheila and laid a detaining hand on her shoulder: "Sheila, stop! It's Crazy Lisbeth! I know her voice!"

He was right. The advancing figure was not the beautiful mother-spirit of Sheila's dream, but a flesh and blood mother who, years before, had lost her husband and only child, and become crazed by her grief. Ever since then her heart had been wandering on a piteous quest for her dead, and her wits with it. And because she was very poor and quite harmless, suffering only the illusion that she would sooner or later find her husband and little daughter, the town was kind to her; set her to work when she would; fed her when she would not work; and left her free for her sad and futile search.

Sheila and Ted knew her well and no fear of her had ever touched them before, but now, as she came onward with her insanity strong upon her, both terror and repugnance seized on Ted.

"She thinks you're her child," he said angrily. "And no wonder! What made you do such a thing?"

Sheila turned to him with her explanation on her lips—the whole confession of her dream and her momentary belief that it had come true—but at sight of him looking at her so protectingly and yet so severely, her impetuous words faltered and grew cold.

"I—I was thinking of my mother," she stammered shyly.

The unexpected reply embarrassed him. He wanted to scold her, but at this mention of her dead mother he could not. So he only dug his foot into the ground and gazed toward Lisbeth, who was now almost upon them, stumbling in her happy haste.

"We can't run away from her," said Sheila.

"She thinks you're her child!" he protested again, but less harshly.

"Yes," admitted Sheila gently, "like I thought she—" And then, at some sudden counsel of her heart, she exclaimed: "You stay here. I'll know what to do!"

It seemed to Ted an unbelievable thing that he saw happen before him then. For Sheila stepped quickly forward to meet the hurrying, pitiful creature who sought her; stepped forward and straight into the woman's arms. As he stared, a shudder of disgust shook Ted from head to foot. "It's horrible!" he muttered to himself. "It's horrible for Sheila to let Crazy Lisbeth hug her!" But he could not go and draw Sheila away. His repulsion would not permit him to approach the spectacle that excited it.

And meanwhile the little girl was murmuring, still in the fold of Lisbeth's arm, words that he could not understand, but that drifted to him with the soft sounds of pleadings and promises.

"Sheila!" he called peremptorily.

She did not reply, but talked on to Lisbeth, interrupted now and then by the latter, but evidently not discouraged in her purpose of persuasion.

"Sheila!" Ted called again, and this time uneasily.

And now she answered, over her shoulder, and with a motion that held him back: "We're going home!"

At that he understood what she was bent upon. She had been coaxing Lisbeth to go home. But why should she concern herself about one who was used to roam the whole countryside at any hour of the day or night, walking unmolested in the desolate safety of her affliction? Why, above all, should Sheila go home with her?

For that, apparently, was what Sheila meant to do. She had already started onward with her self-appointed charge, and though the woods had grown more shadowy, Ted could see the two figures plainly, walking close together and linked by the woman's arm. That arm about Sheila's shoulder—Crazy Lisbeth's arm!—set him shuddering again as violently as the first embrace had done. It was an affront to every fiber of his thoroughly normal being. But still he could not go nearer to remove it; by the law of his own nature he had to stay outside the circle of Lisbeth's madness and Sheila's folly. And his sense of responsibility had, perforce, to appease itself with his following them at a discreet range—a distant and sulking protector.

It seemed to him, as he strode on behind them with irate steps, that they would never get out of the woods. Little woodland sounds, a snapping bough, a breaking leaf, a scurrying squirrel, sounds that he would not ordinarily have noticed, now startled him into fright. The gradual failing of the light oppressed him almost to panic; and when the early twilight settled somberly over the woods, such weird, moving shadows rose up all around him that he would fain have taken to his heels