This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

time, she noticed a man who sat by the road-side near her, looking out over the valley with gloomy eyes.

As she drew nearer to him and saw the loose way in which he sat, and the loose set of his jaw, she turned her face away with a momentary feeling of impatience, and walked on. Then suddenly she glanced at the Dream. "The part that I couldn't remember, just slipped right through my mind" she said, "and then slid off down the valley, just as if that little whiff of wind had brought it, and carried it away again."

"What caused it?" asked the Dream.

"I don't know," said Marjorie. "It just slid by and was gone."

The Dream shrugged his shoulders. "You aren't very observing, are you?" he said.

"Why?" asked Marjorie, looking about again.

"Well," said the Dream, "if you were observing of experiences, you would have noticed that when a little whiff of something slips through your mind, there has always been a cause for it. Sometimes it is a little whiff of memory, a glimpse of something that you never saw but once in your life, which some bit of a sound has brought back, without your even noticing the sound itself. Perhaps it is a bit of incident of a long, long time ago, brought merely by the flick of light on a bird's wing as if flashes past. Or perhaps it is a vague whisper of last night's dream,