I suppose my perfectly frank stare said as much, for she blushed a little, and continued with a very suspicious flutter, which I had learnt, in the case of young engaged persons I knew, to look on as a bad symptom: 

“I do not mean dreaming with my eyes shut, you know, but having deep, serious thoughts, unlike the gay fancies that have held me captive all my life.”

“Dress trimmings and poetry?” I suggested.

“Yes, yes—­all the useless, perishable fancies of thoughtless youth,” she replied.

This sounded more like an Essay on Vanity than Bessie Haines, and I really was astonished, and had nothing to say for a little while, during which she, being full of her subject, went on: 

“I can scarcely trace the beginning of the—­the awakening, shall I call it?”

“You called it a dream before.”

“Yes, dear Winnie, but it is so hard to know how to classify new emotions, and this is such a peculiar one that it seems nameless.  You know papa feels bound, ever since that water-dream he had, to go down to the Mariners’ Chapel on Sunday afternoon, and I used to read solemn poetry when it was too warm or too cold to go with him.  Well, about two months ago it was fearfully warm, and papa had come home a fortnight earlier from the shore, on account of a suspicion he had that he had dreamed something and had forgotten it as soon as he awoke.  This indistinct warning made him think we had better go home at all events, and home we came the first week in September, to the roasting, dusty city.  But I did not then know that I was perhaps drawn back for a purpose; and oh, dear Winnie, there may be something in papa’s visions, after all.”

“He has had a good many of them,” I said.

“So he has,” assented Bessie; “and I was inclined to be impatient at this one, since it brought me home in the heat, and the house seemed so lonely, because Mrs. Tanner was still in the country with her married daughter.”

“She having received no spectral warning,” I hinted.

“Oh dear! no.  Mrs. Tanner never dreams:  she’s opposed to it.  Well, the first Sunday was so warm that I took up Solemn Thoughts in Verse instead of the Mariners’; and after I had read eight pages, it really seemed as if I had better have tried the heat out of doors, it was getting so gloomy within.  So I got up and dressed, meaning to walk out and meet papa, and return with him.  I don’t know whether it was the Solemn Thoughts that confused me, or whether I was not paying attention, but I actually lost my way by turning at the wrong corner, and so came down Barton street toward a little chapel that I had often noticed before.  Two dreadfully red-faced and short-haired little boys were at the entrance by the small iron gate.  They had disagreed about something, I suppose, just as I came up, and they instantly began to fight, with the wickedest determination visible in their freckled little faces.