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Millard met me at the station with his car, and we drove over to Milford through the green freshness of a summer evening. We had seen very little of each other during the last two years, but Millard was a man to whom the lapse of time made no difference. Friendship with him was a thing of the country: robust, steadfast, of slow growth, not given to change like the mere fickle friendships of a city.

“Well, how’s life?” he asked.

I told him that I was tired, that the business world was like a pirate ship, and that I was taking a holiday.

“So you are beginning with us,” he said; “that’s good. Grace shall take you in hand. A long chair in the garden, eggs and milk, and a little mild tennis.”

He smiled at me in the old way with his quiet blue eyes. There was no need for me to ask how life was treating him, for his brown and healthy happiness was as obvious as the sunset.

“How long can we keep you?”

“A week, if that is not too long.”

“Of course not. And what are you going to do afterwards?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“Waiting for an inspiration!”

“Yes, that’s about it.”

The Millards had an old white house at the end of an old green garden. The place had an atmosphere: it was mellow, meditative, and very quiet; it was a house that did not stand; it reclined on a green carpet, surrounded by flowers and trees. You felt yourself relax directly you entered it. The rooms were long and not too brightly lit, full of soft colours and old wood. You saw flowers everywhere, and smelt them. Grace Millard lived in a world of flowers.

My first thought was: “Ah—I am going to be happy here.”

And Grace Millard’s welcoming brown eyes seemed to smile a silent acquiescence.

The whole house charmed me with the exception of my bedroom. I do not know what it was about the room that troubled me, for there was everything in it that a thoughtful woman could think of to make a bachelor comfortable. I saw it first just when twilight was beginning to fall. The light was cold, and even a blackbird’s singing could not charm away the room’s impression of sadness, chilliness. The furniture was of lightish oak, the curtains and bedspread purple, the carpet a soft grey. Millard, who was with me, asked if I should like a fire.

“My dear chap, no,” I said; “I haven’t quite forgotten that I am an old soldier.”

The room depressed me. It filled me with a vague sense of unaccountable restlessness, which I explained by the sudden lost feeling that sometimes falls upon a hard-worked man when he has thrown off his harness, and finds himself with nothing to do.

I am a good sleeper, but I slept badly in that room.

“Well, had a good night?”

Millard was spooning out porridge.

“Oh, splendid,” I said, lying cheerfully; “you have no confounded taxis in this corner of Surrey.”

“Some people say the birds are rather noisy.”

“That reminds me of the huntsman who had a grievance against ‘them stinking violets’!”

We lounged, we motored, we played some not very strenuous tennis; I loafed in the hammock and smoked and read novels. I was out in the open air all day, and going in to my meals with immense zest, and yet my sleep in that purple and grey room was brittle and uncertain. The night would begin well—for I was healthily tired—but I woke each night about two, and from that time onwards I dozed between intervals of restless wakefulness. I could not understand this broken sleep, and the feeling of expectancy that would come upon me suddenly. I would lie still and listen just as though I expected to hear some movement.

“Nerves!” I thought; “sudden change of habit. You are more tired than you suspected. Two years of worry and work, without a proper holiday.”

It is unusual for me to dream, but on the fourth night in that room I had a dream that was so vivid and so peculiar that I got up in the grey of the dawn and wrote down its strange details. I was most extraordinarily impressed by it. It made me feel as though I had been somewhere out of myself, and that my conscious self still felt a little bewildered and scared in the body to which it had returned.

I give the jottings as I scribbled them down:

It began with some war picture. I was lying with twenty or thirty men in more or less open ground. Germans rather above us and quite invisible.

Bombing. Rather crude and antiquated, more suggestive of one’s ideas of the XVIIIth Century grenades. Not very serious; no one hurt. Much red flare and smoke, and pieces of metal falling about. One big piece—red hot—fell near me as I lay, a little to my right side, and I made the remark that it would have been unpleasant if that piece had fallen in the middle of my back. Men laughing and joking. No terror.

An interlude.

Billets in some foreign hotel, rather vague. A garden with a group of middle-aged women, English—I think.

Again, the earlier scene. All quiet. I am suddenly alone, rather high up, on sandy ground covered with tussocks of coarse grass. Sand dunes stretch away like the dunes round Nieuport, country I had known during the war. Silence; desolation.

Observed in series:

1. A hole rather like a rabbit hole, and lying in it a leather case with a strap. I did not touch it. Some vague suggestion of a booby trap.

2. I have moved on. I see a man’s civilian overcoat, dark, neatly folded lengthwise with the lining outermost, laid on the sand.

3. I go further. On a rather terrace-like stretch of sand there are three or four hats scattered, Panama or canvas. One, a woman’s, with a faded purple band. I am conscious of surprise. (I have heard it said that one never feels surprise in dreams. I did.)

4. Further on I see things scattered about: rugs, overcoats, one or two tennis rackets in presses! This struck me as very queer.

5. Lower down, another slight, sandy terrace. On it—very vividly—two travelling trunks, bleached rather white, with black leather bindings. A black hand-camera. Next to the camera a white wooden box about nine inches by six, dovetailed, with a sliding lid, sealed at one end with a strip of paper or a big label.

Flashing through my mind the thought: “Fugitives, Belgians, early in war, luggage abandoned. How did they come? By car. How queer!”

6. I turn round and see behind me a low bank of sand and three figures, half sitting, half lying, muffled up, brown coloured and swollen, looking as though they are asleep. Instinctively I know them to be dead. One man wears a cap with ear-flaps. The faces make me think of the brown, flat faces of rag dolls. They are almost featureless, and mummified. I see the small black dot of an eye on one face which turns out to be a fly.

7. I find myself looking over the bank and down into a hollow beyond. More figures, two or three, lying there and seeming to melt into the sand.

8. I look over my left shoulder. About half a mile away over the dunes a white Flemish house flashes up in the grey light, a rather tall and narrow house with a high white gable. A few dark figures are moving about the house.

9. I realize that I have wandered into a place of peril, perhaps behind the German posts or into no-man’s-land close to their trenches. It is all strange. I seem to be standing on ground where no man has stood in open daylight since the beginning of the war. I am conscious of fear, terror, a desire to lie down and crawl somewhere.

10. I woke. The dawn is grey. I hear the sound of birds, and a cock pheasant calling.

I did not mention this dream to the Millards, for it seemed to me so morbid and so uncanny, that having put it on record, I thought it best to pigeon-hole it and to forget. Nor did I in any way connect it with the room or the house. I am not a psychic person. I am afraid my inclination would be to ask myself what I had had for dinner on the previous night. But I could not get away from the vividness of this dream; all its details were extraordinarily distinct; there seemed to be a sort of grim inevitableness running through it. I found myself wondering who those people were who lay dead among the dunes; how had they come there, how had they died? Had I seen something that had actually happened quite a number of years ago?

The dream haunted me all that day, but that night I slept without a break. I found the memory much less vivid; it had begun to fade like the proof of a photograph that has been exposed to the light.

Millard came in from the garden as I wandered downstairs.

“Hallo, Toby; slept well?”

“Splendidly.”

“There is a batch of letters for you somewhere. Where’s that girl put them? Oh, there, on the side-board.”

Grace had not yet appeared, and Millard picked up the morning paper and glanced at the news while I went through my letters. The envelope of the last one carried a very familiar scrawl—Jamie Hamilton’s big, virile hand. There was a foreign postage stamp in the right, upper corner, a Belgian stamp, and I stared at it for a moment with a feeling of surprise.

I opened the letter. The Hamiltons were staying at Ostend, Jamie, Norah, and the two children. Their hotel was the Leopold, very comfortable and all cleaned up, as he had put it. His suggestion was that I should run over and spend part of my holiday with them, and he promised me quite a pleasant time. “It is not half bad here, and not a little amusing. We bathe and play tennis, and I have been teaching the kids to swim. I have had one or two jaunts with Norah to some of the old places. Do you remember Nieuport, and that damned footbridge over the Yser? If family life won’t bore you, come along and join us. Bring your clubs if you care to. We dance a bit. There are one or two quite nice girls here, and Norah is always hinting that you ought to get married.”

All the time I was reading Jamie’s letter I heard a voice inside me saying “You will go.” And yet there was a part of me which did not want to go, for my queer dream had thrown a blight of fear and of horror over all that dune country.

“Do you remember Hamilton?” I asked Millard.

He glanced up from the cricket news.

“Rather. Awful good chap.”

“He and his people are over at Ostend; they want me to join them. I think I shall go.”

I did go. I wired to Hamilton, asking him to book me a room at the Leopold, and I took the Dover-Ostend boat on a still and rather misty day when the sea was like a sheet of ground glass. I leant over the rail and watched the Belgian coast slide by, dim and rather strange with its pale dunes and little watering-places crouching at the edge of the sea. How familiar they were, St. Idesbald, Coxyde, Nieuport Bains, Westende! They had come to life again; but for me they were full of the strange, sad smell of the War, and as for the dunes, they were dominated by my dream. It insinuated itself into my consciousness, permeated it, coloured my impression of things, threw a ghostly blight over all that pale coast. I fought against the absurdity of this curious obsession.

“What rot! You are out for a holiday. Get rid of all this dyspeptic nonsense.”

Hamilton and two very vital young people met me as I came off the boat, Pauline and Phœbe, one dark, the other red, both with long, slim, active legs and dancing eyes. Jamie was his lean, old, quizzical self. The haze had cleared, and Ostend warmed itself in the sunlight at the edge of the yellow sands and the blue of the sea. The atmosphere of my dream dispersed itself. Pauline held on to my left hand and asked me what I had done with my moustache. Phœbe, mischievous yet enigmatical, eddied along between me and Jamie and studied me with friendly intentness. When I smiled she smiled. There was no gloom here, no mystery, save the delightful mystery of childhood, eager and unspoilt.

“I hope you have brought your plus fours, old chap?”

“I have.”

“Daddy—what are plus fours?”

“A certain form of knickerbocker, my dear.”

“Mr. Mayne—I’ve got knickers on. What would they be?”

“Minus tens—I should say!” said her father.

Norah Hamilton was waiting for us on the terrace in front of the hotel. She always smiled at you as though you were some delightful yet whimsical sort of joke. She had been bathing, and her red hair looked massively rebellious.

“So glad you’ve come. I think Jamie was getting a little bored with the family.”

“I have not seen any signs of it,” I said.

My first impression of the Hôtel Leopold was a pleasant one. It was clean and sunny, and not too large; it overlooked the sea; the concierge spoke English, and had a smile that would not be included in the bill. I found that Hamilton had engaged me a really excellent room on the second floor, and I realized that when lying in that comfortable bed with its deep mattress I should be sung to by the sea.

“I shall sleep like the dead here,” I thought, as I began to unpack my baggage.

Dinner found me very ready to enjoy everything, and in a mood to talk nonsense to Norah and the two children. The salle-à-manger was fairly full, and the people were English, Belgian or French “Quite a nice crowd,” according to Jamie—“not too beastly rich. We have made quite a lot of friends.” Our table was in the middle of the room, and they had given me a chair where I faced the windows and could look out over the sea. A series of small tables were ranged next to the windows, and they were the favoured places presented to the Leopold’s longest stayers. I noticed a girl sitting by herself in a corner at one of these little tables. She was very dark and very pale, and not English. Her face interested me. It had a slightly bewildered look, and the eyes were sad.

Pauline and Phœbe were telling me the names of half the people in the room.

“That’s Miss Ferguson.”

“And that’s Major Iles, the purple one.”

“Ssh!” said Norah.

“It’s all right,” Jamie interposed, “Iles is attacking his soup.”

“And that’s Ma’mselle Merville. Isn’t she pretty?”

“Which one?” I asked.

“She—in the corner.”

“Don’t point!” said Norah.

“I think she looks rather sad.”

Hamilton frowned slightly.

“I don’t blame her for that,” he said.

The weather was all that a man could desire, and I spent the next two days romping with the Hamiltons, or rather, with Phœbe and Pauline. They took me in hand; they flicked and teased and laughed the last shreds of worldly seriousness out of me, and I became an irresponsible creature who bathed and basked in the sun, and ran races, and put ten-centime pieces on a flat stone for two young women to shy at. I felt better than I had felt for years, and I went in to my meals like a ploughboy.

But there was one serious note in that big, sunny room with its chattering voices and clatter of knives and forks. My eyes were always being drawn to the Belgian girl who sat alone in the corner. She seemed so much aloof; she never appeared to speak to anybody, though she would smile across to Phœbe and Pauline. I had a feeling that she was not only sad and lonely, but that the money was not too plentiful, and the longer I watched her the more I began to wonder what her history was.

“Why don’t you ask Mademoiselle Merville to play with you?” I asked Pauline.

“Do—you—want to play with her?” retorted that disconcerting young woman.

The laugh was against me.

“She looks lonely,” I said.

“But she won’t play,” Phoebe told me; “she’s awfully sweet, but she doesn’t seem able to play.”

“Have you tried?”

“Of course we’ve tried; but Mumsie told us not to be nuisances. Do you find us nuisances, Uncle Mayne?”

“Oh, not at all,” said I.

That evening in a corner of the smoking-room, while Jamie and I were snatching half an hour’s peace with our pipes before the Leopold’s weekly dance, I asked him about the pale girl in the corner.

“Do you know anything about her?”

He gave me a quizzical look.

“Interested?”

“A bit. She has such a lost look.”

“Well, I do know something about her; half the hotel knows it. A most tragic thing happened to her early in the war.”

“Over here?”

“No, she was in England at the time, learning the language. Her people lived at Brussels, quite wealthy people. The whole family was wiped out.”

“Good heavens! How?”

“That is the strange part of it; nobody knows.”

“Nobody knows!”

“Sounds absurd, doesn’t it? All that the girl ever discovered was that her people and another family left Brussels in two cars. It was at the time of the stampede. They were supposed to be making for this place or for the frontier along the coast.”

He paused to relight his pipe, and in that moment of silence I had a most extraordinary feeling of inward attention. I seemed to know what he was going to tell me, that I knew more about it than he did.

“Well?” I said.

“They simply disappeared, vanished. They were never heard of again.”

“What—the two families?”

“Yes. They and their cars and their luggage.”

“It sounds impossible. But what is the theory?”

“There is no theory. The only thing I can think of is that they fell in somewhere with some German scouting party, some particularly unpleasant party. Oh, well, the men had had drink. All sorts of things happened. We were told so, weren’t we? Men were apt to become savages.”

“You mean—they were butchered?”

“Perhaps.”

“But surely——?”

“Not a trace. And it turned out to be more than a mere tragedy of the affections. The girl lost everything—or nearly everything. Her father took some documents with him. I don’t know anything about the Belgian law, but apparently another side of the family came in for the property. There had been bad feeling, a sort of feud; anyhow, with certain documents missing, the other crowd got all the estate.”

I said nothing for a moment; I was too conscious of a tense feeling of excitement.

“I wish you could introduce me to Mademoiselle Merville.”

“Of course I will.”

“To-night?”

“I’ll try. I warn you—she is rather elusive.”

We knocked out our pipes and went into the lounge. The orchestra had begun to play in the room where the dance was held, and Pauline and Phœbe, who were on the jig with their small feet, made a rush at me.

“Oh, Uncle Mayne, do come and dance with us.”

“Mumsie says we may stay up for an hour.”

Hamilton suppressed them, but quite gently.

“You run along—you two—and begin. You haven’t hired Uncle Mayne for the fortnight.”

He had seen Mademoiselle Merville sitting alone in a corner of the lounge, and he went across, bowed, and spoke to her. She looked startled; she glanced at me. For a moment I thought that she was going to refuse, and then she smiled faintly, and made a slight movement of the head. Hamilton beckoned, and I crossed over.

“Mr. Richard Mayne—Mademoiselle Lucie Merville.”

Hamilton left us and I sat down beside her. She was in black, and it emphasized her pallor and the darkness of her eyes. They were very troubled eyes, and they made me think of her as someone who had never quite recovered from some shock, and who was still bewildered by it. I felt that she was a woman who had to be spoken to very gently. She left the conversation to me, and she listened as though the real Lucie was somewhere far away. I talked about Ostend, the life here, the children.

Her eyes brightened when I brought in Phœbe and Pauline.

“They are dears,” she said.

She spoke English very well, and it gave me an opening.

“You were at school in England, were you not?”

“Yes.”

“You must have lived in England quite a long while.”

She gave me a queer and almost frightened look.

“Yes.”

“During the war?”

For a moment I thought that I had touched with too great a boldness on a matter that was painful to her. Her eyes darkened; I had a feeling that she was about to make some excuse and escape.

“Perhaps you do not care to talk of the war. I am sorry.”

There must have been some sympathy between us, and perhaps she felt that subtle something, an attraction that drew us together.

“People were very kind to me in England. I shall never forget.”

“Oh, well,” I said; “the war drew us all together. Don’t talk about it if you do not wish to.”

“I think that depends.”

“You made friends in England?”

“Yes.”

“Do you ever go over?”

“No.”

There was a pause. We looked at each other rather like two shy children.

“What part of England did you stay in?”

“I spent most of my time in Surrey.”

“Surrey!”

“Yes, near a little village called Milford. Some people were very good to me there.”

I felt something flash in my brain.

“Not the Millards?” I said.

I saw the surprise in her eyes.

“Why—yes; how did you know?”

“I did not know. But I have just been staying with them. They are very old friends of mine.”

We were silent a moment. A faint smile seemed to be playing about her mouth; her thoughts had gone back.

“They were very dear people; they were very kind to me. They gave me a home when I was in very great trouble. It was such a peaceful house, so good.”

It came into my mind that there was one question I wanted to ask her.

“Tell me, did you have that quaint little room with the window looking down over the lawn to the woods?”

Again she looked surprised.

“Yes. It had purple curtains and a greyish carpet, and early in the morning you heard the birds singing.”

I was amazed. She had slept in that room in which I had dreamed my dream, and as I realised it and the almost frightening significance of it I became aware of thoughts that were uncanny. What if her dead had been trying to communicate with her and had failed, while I—a casual stranger—had dreamed of the thing—seen it—years after it had happened. I remembered the curious way in which the room had affected me.

“A most queer coincidence,” I said, “that you and I should meet here.”

I told her nothing of my dream, or hinted at my sudden conjecturing as to whether our meeting in this Ostend hotel was not more than a coincidence. It seemed to me that I—a tired and overworked business man—had had an attack of clairvoyance, but what was more suggestive was my realization of what I had to do. The dune country lay out there, and my dream seemed more vivid than ever. Was it possible that I might find some wild spot in the dunes where my dream would fit like a picture into its frame?

I led the talk away to other things, but before I went to bed that night I got hold of Jamie Hamilton, and told him the whole tale. I could see that he was mildly incredulous, but that at the same time he was quite ready to join in something that had the lure of an adventure.

“Well, what are you going to do?”

“Tramp the dune country.”

“What, all the way from here to Dunkirk?”

“Not so far as that. They would not have got beyond Nieuport, you know.”

“My dear chap!” he said, looking at me as though he thought that I had tumbled too easily into a pit of superstitious foolishness.

“Of course you need not come.”

“Oh, I’ll come. I’ve got an inquiring mind. But I suppose you have said nothing to the girl?”

“Not a word. It would be rather cruel unless I had some proof to give her.”

So Hamilton and I set out next morning to explore the country of the dunes, pretending that we intended to visit some of the old places we had known during the war. We took our lunch with us, and engaged a car to run us out and wait for us. It was a blazing day, with the sea like a mirror and the sand like pale brass, and anyone who has tried to march over loose, sun-warmed sand will tell you that it can be an exhausting and exasperating form of exercise. And, of course, we found nothing that we could point to or identify. One sand dune is much like another, and we tramped that tossed and desolate land-sea, getting very hot and tired, and towards the end of the day Hamilton grew slightly tense and facetious. He had sweated all the sense of adventure out of his long, lean body. Our shoes were full of sand. The glare and the heat of it beat up into our faces.

“Say, old thing, what about getting home for a drink and a bathe?”

I felt disgruntled and a little touchy.

“Yes, it’s the wrong atmosphere.”

“It’s a damned hot one, anyway. The next time you dream a dream, Toby, I’d insist on having a notice board put up.”

We picked up the car and drove back to Ostend, where Jamie went to cool himself in the sea, while I sat in my bedroom examining a map that I had bought. “System is the thing,” I reflected. “I ought to go over the ground systematically, bit by bit. I ought to get the feel of the place, and to do that I must go alone.”

I spent an hour that evening talking to Lucie Merville, feeling more and more attracted by her, and ignoring Hamilton’s suggestion that I should come and play bridge. He was wilfully and wickedly tactless in pretending that I was needed to make up a four. I kept my chair beside Lucie Merville. I had a feeling that she liked me, that she felt at ease with me, and I wanted her to like me. In fact I began to suspect that I wanted much more than that. She appealed to me, as a certain particular woman appeals to a certain man, not for any tangible and purely physical reason, but because there seemed to be some mysterious vibration that we shared. Love is like life; you can analyse its characteristics, but you cannot create it.

We talked about the Millards, and the next day I was out again among the dunes, tramping, watching, trying to discover some familiar undulations, some stretch of sand that might make me feel that I had seen it before. But the dunes baffled me, and after three consecutive days of such sand-slogging, I was thoroughly discouraged and tempted to give up. Hamilton’s quizzical face met me at the dinner-table each evening, and the family was beginning to wonder what morose sort of creature I must be to disappear daily with my lunch stowed away in an old haversack.

“Mayne goes botanizing,” said Hamilton, with a wicked look; “you did not know he was a botanist, did you?”

I felt tired and exasperated, but an hour’s talk with Lucie Merville rested me and put me in such a happy temper that I saw myself going out again on the morrow on the same wild quest. I went. The weather had changed. The sky and the sea were overcast, and I felt that rain was coming on the wings of the west wind. Wayward gleams of pale sunlight touched the dunes, and when my chauffeur put me down and I wandered away towards the Yser I had a curious feeling of being in familiar country. The whole atmosphere had changed. I seemed to be re-entering the atmosphere of my dream, for I remembered the clouds, the pale sunlight, the grey blue distances of approaching rain.

I wandered about among the sandhills; but, in spite of my strange feeling of expectancy, I found nothing that could guide me. The sky grew more solidly grey. I turned a little towards the sea and began to climb a sort of hummocky ridge which spread out in an undulating plateau. I stood there looking over the tumbled landscape, and suddenly—something happened.

I was looking over my left shoulder, and I saw something white flash up in the near distance. It was a tall and rather narrow house with a white gable, lit by a passing gleam of sunlight. It was the house that I had seen in my dream.

I stood and stared. There were one or two figures moving about the house.

I felt a shiver pass down my spine; my knees were tremulous; I looked about me with a sense of awe and of fear.

Within three yards of me rose a bank of sand. It undulated slightly, showed little hummocks and hollows.

I turned to the right. Yes; there was a sort of sandy terrace here of pale, crisp sand.

Yes; but there was nothing else to be seen.

And then I remembered that in this dune country the sand was blown by the wind; it collected against solid objects and covered them.

My sense of fear passed into action. I bent down and began to scrape at one of the hummocks on the sloping bank. I must have scraped away six inches of sand when my fingers touched something hard.

I drew up and back. I stared. I was sweating, and the feeling of fear had returned.

Then, I knelt down and made myself go on with the job. A black thing came into view. It was a man’s boot, but a man’s boot by itself had no significance. It was the thing that the boot covered that mattered.

I knelt, staring at two white sticks that disappeared into the top of the boot. They were the two shin-bones of a skeleton.