face! Well! What other face could he have dreamed of? And her
complexion was fairer than Parian marble, than the heads of angels.
The wind at the end was the morning breeze entering through the
open porthole and touching his face before the schooner could swing
to the chilly gust.

Yes! And all this rational explanation of the fantastic made it
only more mysterious and weird. There was something daemonic in
that dream. It was one of those experiences which throw a man out
of conformity with the established order of his kind and make him a
creature of obscure suggestions.

Henceforth, without ever trying to resist, he went every afternoon
to the house where she lived. He went there as passively as if in
a dream. He could never make out how he had attained the footing
of intimacy in the Dunster mansion above the bay--whether on the
ground of personal merit or as the pioneer of the vegetable silk
industry. It must have been the last, because he remembered
distinctly, as distinctly as in a dream, hearing old Dunster once
telling him that his next public task would be a careful survey of
the Northern Districts to discover tracts suitable for the
cultivation of the silk plant. The old man wagged his beard at him
sagely. It was indeed as absurd as a dream.

Willie of course would be there in the evening. But he was more of
a figure out of a nightmare, hovering about the circle of chairs in
his dress-clothes like a gigantic, repulsive, and sentimental bat.
"Do away with the beastly cocoons all over the world," he buzzed in
his blurred, water-logged voice. He affected a great horror of
insects of all kinds. One evening he appeared with a red flower in