with carvings in wood and stone, almost met above my head.

I sought someone whom I had never seen, yet knew that I should
recognize when found. My quest was not aimless and fortuitous; it
had a definite method. I turned from one street into another without
hesitation and threaded a maze of intricate passages, devoid of the
fear of losing my way.

Presently I stopped before a low door in a plain stone house which
might have been the dwelling of an artisan of the better sort, and
without announcing myself, entered. The room, rather sparely
furnished, and lighted by a single window with small diamond-shaped
panes, had but two occupants; a man and a woman. They took no notice
of my intrusion, a circumstance which, in the manner of dreams,
appeared entirely natural. They were not conversing; they sat apart,
unoccupied and sullen.

The woman was young and rather stout, with fine large eyes and a
certain grave beauty; my memory of her expression is exceedingly
vivid, but in dreams one does not observe the details of faces.
About her shoulders was a plaid shawl. The man was older, dark, with
an evil face made more forbidding by a long scar extending from near
the left temple diagonally downward into the black mustache; though
in my dreams it seemed rather to haunt the face as a thing apart--I
can express it no otherwise--than to belong to it. The moment that I
found the man and woman I knew them to be husband and wife.

What followed, I remember indistinctly; all was confused and
inconsistent--made so, I think, by gleams of consciousness. It was
as if two pictures, the scene of my dream, and my actual