Everywhere there was a cold and mistlike darkness. Shapes emerged. Billows of whiter mist loomed nearer through the darkness, came from every corner of utmost space. The dark heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; the white billows poured in on every side, engulphed me, choked me with icy fumes. Was I dead, and awake in cold Eternity?

The mists turned into molten suns who scorched my body till only the soul was left, naked against the burning heat.

I died again, to wake once more in a new causeless Eternity of terror. Always there was a menace, everywhere a fear. I knew I was dreaming, in a dream within a dream; this gave me no ease, as I knew that dreams were true. Rather were the pain, the terror, the pursuit, more real, more awful, than waking ills. My agony of soul was unsearchable; there was no God even to cry to, for soon I was God, in His loneliness without help or escape, without beginning and without end.

Human shapes, with a horror and a power to do me evil far beyond their real stature in my past, pursued, reached, assailed, slew me. Always I died, and always I woke to a new universe of more sickening fear. Aunt Jael, Benamuckee—every evil face and evil fact from the old days of the life I had once dreamt on the earth, invested now with infinite power and unimaginable horror—menaced me, dogged my piteous flight along the unending pathway of Eternity. Uncle Simeon was there. The most horrible fear of my childhood, he was the most horrible now: an Evil more ghastly than human memory or imagination. "Twelve years ago, twelve years ago!" I whispered. He saw, rushed to the door, while I rushed madlier across the roof-room to my attic. This time he would outrun me. No, I was in time. I tore through the aperture and just had time, shivering in fright, to huddle down upon the floor before the key turned and he was in upon me, over me, peering at me with unpitying cruelty and hate, I lay numbly staring at the yellow-pale face, the savage blue eyes, the wet thin lips, the honey-coloured beard—now tinged with grey—just as it would be now in "real" life, I had enough reason in my dream to be able (in a frightening lapse from feeling to thought) to reflect. The face came nearer, gleamed physically its hate, seemed to breathe at me.

"Oh, God!" I prayed wildly, "Where am I? Tell me, oh tell me! If a dream, of thy pity awaken me: if life after death, slay me for ever!"

Now he was Simeon Greeber the poisoner; he was pouring something into a phial, he took a tiny white tablet—fear made my dream-eyes keen—and dissolved it in the liquid. Some one was propping me up, his eyes were gleaming with hope, he lifted the glass to my lips—

"Poisoner!" I shrieked and dashed the glass away. I put my hands swiftly to my eyes, and they were open. My bed, the ChÂteau Villebecq bedroom, half-drawn blinds, a hundred impressions instantaneously reached me. I was awake again, and in this world; my chin and neck were wet with the spilled liquid, and he was there, the this-world Uncle Simeon, hastily picking up bits of glass. He was real, and I knew it; he looked up and knew that I knew.

Could I sham him into doubting it? My senses had not properly returned, and flog my brain as I would, in a frantic second of endeavour, she could not tell me how or why I was here in bed, how or why Uncle Simeon was here beside me.

I smiled, assumed my frankest stare, and shammed that I was dreaming again. (Unless it was, after all, a dream unnameably real, a dream within a dream.) Staring at him fixedly as though I did not see him—and for a half-moment I saw doubt in his eyes—"Madam," I cried, "some one has tried to poison me. Find him, find him!"

Deceived or no, he was not losing his chance. "One will find him soon, one will find him," he whispered soothingly, the while preparing another potion below the level of the bed: "Meanwhile, dearie, drink something to make you better." Swiftly he seized me, grasped my neck as in a vice, and forced the glass against my lips.

Somehow I got my mouth away, somehow I managed to shriek, to shriek till I seemed to be losing my senses again. In dream-fashion shapes crowded round me once more: Elise and Suzanne—and the Stranger. Whether real shapes or not, they were Friends. I was saved. All would be well. And I fell into a dreamless sleep.

To this day I do not know with absolute sureness whether these moments were dream or waking life. Little is the difference, for is not the one as real, or as unreal, as the other?