The garden was a mass of tangled weeds—he noticed a bramble that barred the door across and across.

'They did not find the place so easy to let,' he found himself saying.

His companion released him, and, wrenching off the rotting shutter of one of the lower windows, climbed into the house. Claude, impelled against his will, followed.

He saw, very distinctly (as, indeed, he had seen everything very distinctly in his dream), the dreadful, bare, disordered room of Ambrosine.

Then a deeper and more utter horror descended on him. He knew, suddenly, and with utter conviction, that he was with the murderer of Ambrosine.

And while he formed a shriek, the creature came at him with raised knife and had him by the throat, and he knew that he was being killed as she had been killed, that their two fates were bound together; and that her destiny, from which he had tried to free himself, had closed on him also.

This being the culmination of the dream, he woke; he slept no more till morning, and even in the daylight hours the dream haunted him with a great and invincible dread.

It was the more horrible that reality mingled with it—remembrance of days that had really existed were blended with remembrance of that dreadful day of the dream, recollections of Ambrosine were blended with that vision of her deserted home.

The past and the dream became one, rendering the dead woman an object of horror, hateful and repellent. He could not without a shudder recall her gayest moments or think of the little theatre where she used to act.

So three days passed, and then he dreamt the dream again.

In every detail he went through it as he had been through it before, and by no effort could he awake until the dream was accomplished and he was in the grip of the murderer of Ambrosine, with the steel descending into his side.

And the day of his journey was now only a week off he hardly thought of trying to evade it, of pleading illness or asking another to take his place; it was part of the horror of the thing that he felt that it was inevitable that he should go—that his journey was not to be evaded by any effort, however frantic, that he might make.

Besides, he had his sane, reasonable moments when he was able to see the folly of being troubled by a dream which had recalled a little dancer with whom he had once been in love, and involved her with a certain journey near her dwelling that he was bound to make.

That was what it came to—just a dream and a recollection.

He argued in these quiet moments that it was not strange that his proposed journey to Saint-Cloud should arouse memories of Ambrosine and that the two should combine in a dream.

He distracted himself by taking a deeper interest in the wild, fierce life of Paris, by listening to all the tragedies daily recounted, by visiting all the quarters most lawless and most distressed. One day he even went, for the first time, to watch the executions. The real horror would check, he thought, the fanciful horror that haunted him.

But the first victim he saw was a young girl with hands red from the cold, a strained mouth and fair hair turned up on her small head; her eyes, over which the dullness of death seemed to have already passed, stared in the direction of Claude. He turned away with a movement so rough that the crowd, pressing round him, protested fiercely.

Claude strode through the chill and windy streets of Paris and thought of the approaching 12th of December as of the day of his death. So intense became his agitation that he turned instinctively towards his one friend, as one being enclosed in darkness will turn towards the one light.

René Legarais was his fellow clerk and his first confidant and counsellor—a man a few years older than himself, and, like himself, sober, quiet, industrious, and well balanced.

Claude found his lodging near the Pre-aux-Clercs empty; René was yet at the Chamber.

Claude waited; he found himself encouraged even by the sight of the cheerful, familiar room, with books, and lamp, and fire, and the coffee-service waiting for his friend's return.

He now tried hard to reason himself out of his folly.

He would tell René, and with the telling he would see the absurdity of the whole thing and they would laugh it away together over a glass of wine.

René, he remembered, had also been in love with Ambrosine, but in a foolish, sentimental fashion—Claude smiled to think of it, but he believed that René had been ready to marry the little creature. She had even favoured his respectful wooing (so gossip said) until Claude had appeared, with bolder methods and his vivid good looks and his lavish purse.

René had retired with the best of grace, and that was all long ago and forgotten by both; Claude wondered why he thought of it now, sitting here in the warmth and light. Only because he was unnerved and unstrung and obsessed by that weird dream.

René came home at his usual hour, flushed by the sharp wind and shaking the raindrops from his frieze coat. He was a pale young man with heavy brown hair, insignificant features, and a mole on his upper lip. He looked unhealthy and pensive, and wore horn-rimmed glasses when he worked.

'Where were you this afternoon?' he asked. 'Your desk was empty.'

'I was not well,' said Claude.

René gave him a quick glance.

Claude looked well enough now, a colour from the fire in his handsome brown face, his slim figure stretched at ease in the deep-armed leather chair and a half-mocking smile on his lips.

'I went to see the executions,' he added.

'Bah!' said René.

He came to the fire and warmed his hands, which were stiff and red with cold; they reminded Claude of the hands of the girl whom he had seen on the platform of the guillotine.

'It is the first time,' replied Claude, 'and I shall not go again.'

'I have never been,' said René.

'There was a girl there.' Claude could not keep it off his tongue. 'There always are girls, I believe.'

'She was quite young.'

'Yes?' René looked up, aware that interest was expected of him.

'And then—like Ambrosine.'

'Ambrosine?'

'You remember,' said Claude impatiently, 'the little dancer...at Saint-Cloud.'

'Oh, whatever made you think of her?' René looked relieved, as if he had expected something more portentous and terrible.

'That is what I wish to know—what has made me think of her? I believed that I had forgotten.'

'I had, certainly.'

'So had I.'

'What has reminded you?'

Claude struggled with his trouble, which now seemed to him ridiculous.

'I have to go to Saint-Cloud,' he said at last.

'When?'

'The 12th.'

'On business of the Chamber?'

'Yes.'

'And this reminded you?'

'Yes—you see,' explained Claude slowly, 'I have not been there since.'

'Not since?' René pondered, and seemed to understand. 'And lately I have had a dream.'

'Oh, dreams,' said René; he lifted his shoulders lightly and turned to the fire.

'Do you dream?' asked Claude, reluctant to enter on the subject, yet driven to seek the relief of speech.

'Who does not dream—now—in Paris?'

Claude thought of the thin girl on the steps of the guillotine. 'There is good matter for dreams in Paris,' he admitted, adding gloomily; 'I wish that I had not been to the executions.'

René was making the coffee; he laughed good-naturedly.

'Come, Claude, what is the matter with you? What have you on your conscience?'

'Ambrosine.'

René lifted his brows. 'Have you not found, in Paris, in three years, a woman to make you forget Ambrosine, poor little fool?'

'I had forgotten,' said Claude fiercely, 'but this cursed journey—and this cursed dream—made me remember.'

'You are nervous, overworked,' replied his friend; it was quite true that in these few weeks Claude had been working with a desperate energy; he snatched eagerly at the excuse.

'Yes, yes, that is it...but the times...enough to unnerve any man—death and ruin on either side and the toils closing on so many one knew.'

René poured out the coffee, took his cup, and settled himself comfortably in the armchair opposite Claude. He drank and stretched his limbs with the satisfaction of a man pleasantly tired.

'After all, you need not take this journey,' he said thoughtfully; 'there are a dozen would do it for you.'

'That is just it—I feel impelled to go, as if no effort of mine would release me.' He hesitated a moment, then added: 'That is part of the horror of it.'

'The horror?'

'Of the whole thing—do you not see the horror?' asked Claude impatiently.

'My dear fellow, how can I—when you have not told me what this wonderful dream is about?'

Claude flushed, and looked into the fire; after all, he thought, René was too commonplace to understand his ghostly terrors—and the thing did seem ridiculous when he was sitting there warm and comfortable and safe.

Yet it could not be dismissed from his mind—he had to speak, even if to a listener probably unsympathetic.

'It is like a vision,' he said. 'I have had it three times it is a prevision of the journey to Saint-Cloud.'

René, attentive, waited.

'It is so very exact,' continued Claude, 'and each time the same.'

'Tell me.'

'Oh, it is only that—the ride to the gate, the leaving of the lame horse, the walk through the park, and then—'

'Well?'

'The appearance of a man walking beside me.'

'You know him?'

'I hardly saw the face.'

'Well?' René continued to urge Claude's manifest reluctance. 'We went, finally, to the house of Ambrosine.'

'Ah yes, she lived there on the banks of the river—'

'Surely you remember—'

'We were never intimate,' smiled René. 'I do not believe that I ever went to her house. Of course, it was familiar to you?'

'I saw it again exactly—it was shut up; deserted and in decay. My companion broke the window shutters and stepped in. I followed. The room was in disrepair, unfurnished. As I looked round the place—'

He shuddered, in spite of his strong control.

'The fiend with me revealed himself. I knew that he was the murderer of Ambrosine, and he fell on me as he had fallen on her.' René was silent a moment.

'Why should the murderer of Ambrosine wish to murder you?' he asked at length.

'How do I know? I tell you my dream.'

'An extraordinary dream.'

'Would you take it as a warning?'

'A warning?'

'Of what will happen?'

'It is obviously absurd,' said René quietly.

'Yes, absurd—yet I feel as if the 12th of December would be the day of my death.'

'You have brooded over it—you must put it out of your mind.'

'I cannot,' said Claude wildly. 'I cannot!'

'Then don't go.'

'I tell you it is out of my power to stay away.'

René looked at him keenly. 'Then how can I help you?'

Claude took this glance to mean that he doubted his wits. 'Only by listening to my fool's talk,' he said, smiling.

'Does that help?'

'I hope it may.