"Well, Mr. Ibbetson, although you were not Gogo, you became suddenly so
interesting to me that I never forgot you--you were never quite out of
my mind. I wanted to counsel and advise you, and take you by the hand,
and be an elder sister to you, for I felt myself already older than you
in the world and its ways. I wanted to be twenty years older still, and
to have you for my son. I don't know _what_ I wanted! You seemed so
lonely, and fresh, and unspotted from the world, among all those smart
worldlings, and yet so big and strong and square and invincible--oh, so
strong! And then you looked at me with such sincere and sweet and
chivalrous admiration and sympathy--there, I cannot speak of it--and
then you were _so_ like what Gogo might have become! Oh, you made as
warm and devoted a friend of me at first sight as any one might desire!

"And at the same time you made me feel so self-conscious and shy that I
dared not ask to be introduced to you--I, who scarcely know what
shyness is.

"Dear Giulia Grisi sang '_Sedut' al Pie d' un' Salice,' and that tune
has always been associated in my mind with your tongue ever since, and
always will be. Your dear mother used to play it on the harp. Do
you remember?

"Then came that extraordinary dream, which you remember as well as I do:
_wasn't_ it a wonder? You see, my dear father had learned a strange
secret of the brain--how in sleep to recall past things and people and
places as they had once been seen or known by him--even unremembered
things. He called it 'dreaming true,' and by long practice, he told me,
he had brought the art of doing this to perfection. It was the one
consolation of his troubled life to go over and over again in sleep all