So then Laurie sat and meditated.
Once or twice that evening he looked round him tranquilly without a touch of that terror that had seized him in the smoking-room at home.
If all this were true--and he repeated to himself that he knew it was true--these presences were about him now, so why was it that he was no longer frightened?
He looked carefully into the dark corner behind him, beyond the low jutting bookshelf, in the angle between the curtained windows, at his piano, glossy and mysterious in the gloom, at the door half-open into his bedroom. All was quiet here, shut off from the hum of Fleet Street; circumstances were propitious. Why was he not frightened...? Why, what was there to frighten him? These presences were natural and normal; even as a Catholic he believed in them. And if they manifested themselves, what was there to fear in that?
He looked steadily and serenely; and as he looked, like the kindling of a fire, there rose within him a sense of strange exaltation.
"Amy," he whispered.
But there was no movement or hint.
Laurie smiled a little, wearily. He felt tired; he would sleep a little. He beat out his pipe, crossed his feet before the fire, and closed his eyes.
III
There followed that smooth rush into gulfs of sleep that provides perhaps the most exquisite physical sensation known to man, as the veils fall thicker and softer every instant, and the consciousness gathers itself inwards from hands and feet and limbs, like a dog curling himself up for rest; yet retains itself in continuous being, and is able to regard its own comfort. All this he remembered perfectly half an hour later; but there followed in his memory that inevitable gap in which self loses itself before emerging into the phantom land of dreams, or returning to reality.
But that into which he emerged, he remembered afterwards, was a different realm altogether from that which is usual--from that country of grotesque fancy and jumbled thoughts, of thin shadows of truth and echoes from the common world where most of us find ourselves in sleep.
His dream was as follows:-He was still in his room, he thought, but no longer in his chair. Instead, he stood in the very center of the floor, or at least poised somewhere above it, for he could see at a glance, without turning, all that the room contained. He directed his attention--for it was this, rather than sight, through which he perceived--to the piano, the chiffonier, the chairs, the two doors, the curtained windows; and finally, with scarcely even a touch of surprise, to himself still sunk in the chair before the fire. He regarded himself with pleased interest, remembering even in that instant that he had never before seen himself with closed eyes....