Next morning, if Ian himself slept late, Milly slept later still. The strained and troubled look which he had seen upon her face even in sleep the night before, had passed away in the morning, but she lay almost alarmingly still and white. He was reassured by remembering that once when they were in Switzerland she had slept about sixteen hours and awakened in perfect health. He remained in the house watching over her, and about four o'clock she woke up. But she was very pale and very quiet; exhausted, he thought, by her strange mental and physical exertions of the night before.

She came down to tea with her pretty hair unbecomingly twisted up, and dressed in a brownish-yellow tea-gown, which he fancied he remembered hearing her denounce as only fit to be turned into a table-cloth. He did not precisely criticise these details, but they helped in the impression of lifelessness and gloom that hung about her. It was a faint, gleamy afternoon, and such sun as there was did not shine into the study. The dark panelling looked darker than usual, and as she sat silent and listless in a corner of the old sofa, her hair and face stood out against it almost startling in their blondness and whiteness. She was strangely unlike herself, but Stewart comforted himself by remembering that she had been odd in her manner and behavior, though in a different way, after her long sleep in Switzerland. After he had given her tea, he suggested that they should walk in the garden, as the rain was over.

"Not yet, Ian," she said. "I want to try and tell you something. I can do it better here."

Her mouth quivered. He sat down by her on the sofa.

"Must you tell me now?" he asked, smiling. "Do you really think it matters?"

"Yes—it does matter," she answered, tremulously, pressing her folded hands against her breast. "It's something I ought to have told you before you married me—but indeed, indeed I didn't know how dreadful it was—I didn't think it would happen again."

He was puzzled a moment, then spoke, still smiling:

"I suppose you mean the sleep-walking. Well, darling, it is a bit creepy, I admit, but I shall get used to it, if you won't do it too often."

"Did I really walk?" she asked—and a look of horror was growing on her face. "Ah! I wasn't sure. No—it's not that—it is—oh, don't think me mad, Ian!"

"Tell me, dearest. I promise I won't."

"I've not been here at all since you've been living in this house. I've not seen you, my own precious husband, since I went to sleep in Switzerland, at the HÔtel du Chalet—don't you remember—when we had been that long walk up to the glacier and I was so tired?"

Stewart was exceedingly startled. He paused, and then said, very gently but very firmly:

"That's nonsense, dearest. You have been here, you've been with me all the time."

"Ah! You think so, but it was not I—no, don't interrupt me—I mean to tell you, I must, but I can't if you interrupt me. It was awfully wrong of me not to tell you before; but I tried to, and then I saw you wouldn't believe me. Do you remember a dinner-party at the Fletchers', the autumn before we were engaged—when Cousin David had just bought that picture?"

"That portrait of Lady Hammerton, which is so like you? Yes, I remember it perfectly."

"You know I wanted my First so much and I had been working too hard, and then I was told that evening that you had said I couldn't get it—"

"Silly me!"

"And I felt certain you didn't love me—"

"Silly you!"

"Don't interrupt me, please. And I wasn't well, and I cried and cried and I couldn't leave off, and then I allowed Tims to hypnotize me. We both knew she had no business to do it, it was wrong of us, of course, but we couldn't possibly guess what would happen. I went to sleep, and so far as I knew I never woke again for more than six months, not till the Schools were over."

"But, my darling, I skated with you constantly in the Christmas Vacation, and took your work through the Term. I assure you that you were quite awake then."

"I remember nothing about it. All I know is that some one got my First for me."

"But, Mildred—"

"Why do you call me Mildred? That's what they called me when I woke up last time; but my own name's Milly."

Stewart rose and paced the room, then came back.

"It's simply a case of collapse of memory, dear. It's very trying, but don't let's be fanciful about it."

"I thought it was only that—I told you, didn't I, something of that sort? But I didn't know then, nobody told me, that I wasn't like myself at all those months I couldn't remember. Last night in my sleep I knew—I knew that some one else, something else—I can't describe it, it's impossible—was struggling hard with me in my own brain, my own body, trying to hold me down, to push me back again into the place, whatever it was, I came out of. But I got stronger and stronger till I was quite myself and the thing couldn't really stop me. I dare say it only lasted a few seconds, then I felt quite free—free from the struggle, the pressure; and I saw myself standing in the room, with some kind of white floating stuff over my head and about me, and I saw myself open the door and go out of the room. I wasn't a bit surprised, but I just lay there quiet and peaceful. Then suddenly it came to me that I couldn't have seen myself, that the person, the figure I had seen go out of the door was the other one, the creature I had been struggling with, who had stolen my shape; and it came to me that she was gone to steal you—to steal your heart from me and take you away; and you wouldn't know, you would think it was I, and you would follow her and love her and never know it was not your own wife you were loving. And I was mad with anger; I never knew before what it meant, Ian, to be as angry as that. I struggled hard to get up, and at last I managed it, and I came down-stairs after her, but I couldn't find her, and I was sure that she had gone and had taken you away with her. And you say I really did come down-stairs."

"Yes, darling, and if you had been awake instead of asleep, as you obviously were, you would have seen that this nightmare of yours was nothing but a nightmare. You would have seen that I was alone here, quietly arranging my papers before going to bed. You gave me a fright coming down as you did, for there was a tremendous thunderstorm going on, and I am ashamed to say how queer my own nerves were. The electrical state of the atmosphere and a very loud clap of thunder just overhead, account for the whole business, which probably lasted only a few seconds from beginning to end. Be reasonable, little woman, you are generally the most reasonable person I know—except when you talk about going to Dieppe."

Milly gave him a strange look.

"Why am I not reasonable when I talk about going to Dieppe?"

He drew her to him and kissed her hair.

"Never mind why. We aren't going to excite ourselves to-day or do anything but make love and forget nightmares and everything disagreeable."

She drew herself away a little and looked with frightened eyes in his.

"But I can't forget, Ian, that I don't remember anything that has happened since we were on our honeymoon in Switzerland. And now we are in Oxford, and I can see it's quite late in the summer. How can I forget that somehow I am being robbed of myself—robbed of my life with you?"

"Wait till to-morrow and you'll remember everything right enough."

But Milly was not to be convinced. She was willing to submit on the question of last night's experiences, but she assured him that Tims would bear her out in the assertion that she had never recovered her recollection of the months preceding her engagement. Ian ceased trying to convince her that she was mistaken on this point; but he argued that the memory was of all functions of the brain the most uncertain, that there was no limit to its vagaries, which were mere matters of nerves and circulation, and that Dr. Norton-Smith, the nerve and brain specialist to whom he would take her, would probably turn out to have a dozen patients subject to the same affliction as herself. One never hears of half the ills that flesh is heir to until the inheritance falls to one's own lot.

Milly was a common-sense young woman, and his explanation, especially as it was his, pacified her for the time. The clouds had been rolling away while they talked, the space of deep blue sky overhead growing larger, the sunshine fuller. There was a busy twittering and shaking of little wings in the tall pear-tree near the house, where the tomtits in their varied liveries loved to congregate. July was not far advanced and the sun had still some hours in which to shine. Ian and Milly went out and walked in the Parks. The tennis-club lawns were almost deserted, but they met a few acquaintances taking their constitutional, like themselves, and an exchange of ordinary remarks with people who took her normality for granted, helped Milly to believe in it herself. So long as the blank in her memory continued, she could not be free from care; but she went to sleep that night in Ian's arms, feeling herself protected by them not only from bodily harm, but from all those dreadful fears and evil fantasies that "do assault and hurt the soul."