He, meanwhile, sometimes seemed to himself to be walking in a dream.
The region in which he was living, changed, yet so familiar, the
thought of being once more, after so many years of homeless wandering,
in his own land and among his own countrymen, and the companionship of
Mary Leithe, like, yet so unlike, the Mary Cleveland he had known and
loved, possessing in reality all the tenderness and lovely virginal
sweetness that he had imagined in the other, with a warmth of heart
that rejuvenated his own, and a depth and freshness of mind answering
to the wisdom that he had drawn from experience, and rendering her,
though in her different and feminine sphere, his equal--all these
things made Drayton feel as if he would either awake and find them the
phantasmagoria of a beautiful dream, or as if the past time were the
dream, and this the reality. Certainly, in this ardent, penetrating
light of the present, the past looked vaporous and dim, like a range of
mountains scaled long ago and vanishing on the horizon.
And was this all? Doubtless it was, at first.
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