It was much after his usual hour when Waymark awoke on Good Friday
morning. He had been troubled throughout the night with a strangely
vivid dream, which seemed to have repeated itself several times;
when he at length started into consciousness the anguish of the
vision was still upon him.

He rose at once, and dressed quickly, doing his best to shake off
the clinging misery of sleep. In a little while it had passed, and
he tried to go over in his mind the events of the preceding day.
Were they, too, only fragments of a long dream? Surely so many and
strange events could not have crowded themselves into one period of
twelve hours; and for him, whose days passed with such dreary
monotony. The interview with Maud Enderby seemed so unnaturally long
ago; that with Ida Starr, so impossibly fresh and recent. Yet both
had undoubtedly taken place. He, who but yesterday morning had felt
so bitterly his loneliness in the world, and, above all, the
impossibility of what he most longed for--woman's companionship--
found himself all at once on terms of at least friendly intimacy
with two women, both young, both beautiful, yet so wholly different.
Each answered to an ideal which he cherished, and the two ideals
were so diverse, so mutually exclusive. The experience had left him
in a curious frame of mind. For the present, he felt cool, almost
indifferent, to both his new acquaintances. He had asked and
obtained leave to write to Maud Enderby; what on earth could he
write about? How could he address her? He had promised to go and see
Ida Starr, on a most impracticable footing. Was it not almost