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Miranda remained, and Mr. Waddy turned to her in a despairing search for information.

“You are sure that person in the tarpaulin was Miss Sullivan?” he questioned. “Sullivan, I think you said?”

Miranda nodded.

“Quite certain,” she assured him.

“Then,” murmured Waddy, “I’ve seen a ghost. I’m insane. I always wished to know what the feeling was. Now I have it. Bring a strait-jacket, quick! I’m dangerous! Hold me!”

And he sank back, looking excessively feeble and quite manageable.

Presently he seemed to revive a little.

“Miss Miranda,” he continued, “how do you suppose I know your name?”

“Perhaps you heard mother call me,” she suggested.

“No,” said he, “I heard it in a dream, an exquisite dream, such as may come to us insane men to compensate us for losing our wakeful wits. My dream was this: I thought that I was lying powerless in the dominion of a wonderful delight—a delight not strange, but seemingly familiar as a fulfilled prophecy, whose fulfilment had been forever a lingering certainty. I was lying, trammelled by a willing motionlessness, in the loveliest glade of a wood fresh as Paradise. And then my trance, so content with its own happiness, was visited with happiness inexpressibly greater. It seemed that a face, well known, as to dreams of infancy a mother’s sweet watchfulness may be,—that such a face, perhaps my own life-long dream of pureness personified, bent over me and seemed searching through my closed eyes, into my very soul, for the imperishable legends of my better life, written there beneath my earliest and holiest vows. I heard a voice, such as I may have dreamed the voice of an angel, and it said, ‘Beautiful world of God! Why are we not happy?’ Then all the vision faded into dimness and someone like you, you in fact, came between me and the angel, and the voice called you by your name, ‘Miranda.’”