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of bright uniforms and shouting charges and triumphs and flags and
bands--in a time when half the world drew its food supply from
regions ten thousand miles away--"
The man with the white face paused. I glanced at him, and his
face was intent on the floor of the carriage. A little railway
station, a string of loaded trucks, a signal-box, and the back of
a cottage, shot by the carriage window, and a bridge passed with a
clap of noise, echoing the tumult of the train.
"After that," he said, "I dreamt often. For three weeks of
nights that dream was my life. And the worst of it was there were
nights when I could not dream, when I lay tossing on a bed in this
accursed life; and there--somewhere lost to me--things were
happening--momentous, terrible things . . . I lived at nights--my
days, my waking days, this life I am living now, became a faded,
far-away dream, a drab setting, the cover of the book."
He thought.
"I could tell you all, tell you every little thing in the
dream, but as to what I did in the daytime--no. I could not
tell--I do not remember. My memory--my memory has gone. The
business of life slips from me--"
He leant forward, and pressed his hands upon his eyes. For a
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