He had stopped drinking, and he had stopped dreaming, years ago; the desire for drink had never come back, but the desire for dreaming was upon him again. He felt that his whole life of triumphant common sense was at stake. But no, it could n't be. An hour in a moonlit garden could not undo the solid achievement of twelve years. He put his hat back on the stand. With a guilty sense of having yielded to a weakness, he passed quietly out, past the door from behind which came the inspired click of type-writer keys fashioning some strange adventure.

In the garden he stood and looked about. There was a full moon above, dimmed with clouds and casting that half-light which transforms the accustomed world into the realm of fancy. On such a night as this— Odd bits of poetry, remembered from his youth, come into his mind.

Across from where he stood was a high board fence, and in it a gate, painted ivory-white. He had an impulse to go over and open it. But instead he stood still, mockingly analyzing that impulse. "In a story," he said to himself, "there would be an adventure waiting in the next garden. But in real life, as I well know, there is only another garden, like this, with no one there. People do not moon about in gardens."

But then he reflected, "I am mooning about in a garden." Realizing that bankers do not do such things, it seemed to him that he was not a banker, but, as his friend had said, a phantom in a phantom world where impossible things come true.

He surrendered himself for a moment to this feeling, and began to think foolish thoughts, such as he had not thought for twelve years.

"What if there should be an adventure waiting for me on the other side of that gate? What if there were a girl in that garden, waiting?" These thoughts were frightening, and nevertheless they made him happy.

Then his common sense reasserted itself. There was nothing in that other garden, and he was being a damn fool. He reflected gratefully that no one would ever know what a damn fool he was. The depositors at the bank could never guess, nor could his wife. And since there was nothing on the other side of the gate, he might as well go and open it and look into the garden, and then go back to bed.

He walked over to the gate, and there he paused. Why trouble himself to prove what he already knew? Why not keep intact the memory of this absurd fancy and have the pleasure of thinking that perhaps, after all, there had been an adventure waiting beyond that gate?

He realized that if he opened the gate and nothing happened, it would hurt. He put his hand on the latch in a mood curiously like the mood of prayer. If he had had a God to whom such a prayer could be addressed, he might have prayed that just this once

But his was no pagan deity, and so he did not pray. Lacking the courage that prayer sometimes gives, he took his hand from the latch.

Then he remembered how he had gone down to the waterfront every morning and looked out over the bay and never set sail for the islands of romance; and he felt that this was a test. It did n't make any difference what happened: he could n't turn back. He pushed open the gate softly. Seated on a little wooden bench was a girl; her face was turned away from

him, but he could see the languid sweep of a slender arm, bare and beautiful.

One last reminder of his ordinary self intruded into his mind, the façade of the bank on Fifth Avenue, symbol of twelve years of sturdy effort in the realm of common sense. But it seemed to have no relation whatever to this moment, and it faded and was gone.

He stood looking at the girl for the space of a breath; then he walked over to her through a tangle of moonlight that broke through the branches of an elm.

IV. Afterward. The milk-wagons were rattling over the streets when he went back through the ivory gate, and he could hear the type-writer still clattering within the house. He went silently to the guest-room, undressed, and flung himself on the bed. The adventure was over, and now he had to think about its relation to actuality. But he did not think; he fell asleep.

At the bank there were other matters to occupy his mind. On the train to the country that afternoon there was a neighbor who talked about financial conditions. At the end of the ride there was his wife's welcome and the children climbing into his arms. It was n't until after dinner that he had any time to think.

He was rather surprised at his thoughts. They were, first of all, thoughts of relief at being back at home. It was as if he had strayed for a few hours out of time and space, and was happy to find himself again safely within the cosy contours of the familiar. He was glad to be back in a world that had a meaning beyond the moment, a world that reached back in

memory and forward in hope, the world of reality.

As a happy citizen of this comfortable world, he was naturally concerned with the inquiry whether his position in it had been endangered by last night's adventure. And it seemed to him that he need have no fear. That adventure was a thing utterly apart from all the rest of his life-a thing complete and perfect in itself, with no sequel to be feared or hoped for; they did not even know each other's names. She herself had preferred that it should be so.

"And," she had said, "you need n't fear that it will ever be made commonplace by our meeting at a tea somewhere; you will never see me again." And he had said, laughing:

"You speak as though you were going to die or going on a very long journey!"

"Yes," she said; "something like that. that. You must n't ask me about it, only take my word for it.”

And he strangely believed her. Why, he did not know. But to-day he was glad to be so sure that their adventure was ended and that no one but themselves could ever know about it. He had left his friend and gone up to bed; he had sat down to read a magazine before he went to sleep; and in the morning he had been awakened for coffee. Over the coffee he had asked:

"Who lives in the little white house next door, a writer?" and was told, "A school-teacher, I believe." Evidently his friend did not know of the school-teacher's guest. No; so far as all the world was concerned, there had been no midnight adventure. It was as detached from reality, as immaterial from any common sense point of view,

as if it had been merely a story he had read in a magazine that night. He might, if he wished, think of it as that.

He was a little startled, as by an odd coincidence, when his wife asked: "Shall I read you a story? The new magazines have come." But really it was no coincidence at all, for she knew that he liked magazine stories and enjoyed being read to in the evenings. The thing had happened many times before; nevertheless, it was a little strange to be listening to such a story, while in and out of his mind there flashed bright memories of another story.

"Why always the South Seas, I wonder?" his wife paused to remark, looking up from the big chair where she sat with the magazine in her lap. "I suppose it is a more romantic place." "Yes, perhaps," he said.

He had talked to that girl last night about the South Seas; he had said he would like to take her there to see the strange birds and flowers. And she had told him about Venice. And while they talked of sail-boats and gondolas, they were sitting on a garden bench.

"He gets the romantic atmosphere rather well, does n't he?" said his wife. "I think I can guess which one of the girls he is going to fall in love with, the one with the red hibiscus flower in her hair. What do you think?"

"Very likely," he agreed.

from what she had been that night— as different as he had been from his ordinary self. None of his friends would have recognized him as the romantic wanderer whom she had held for a moment in her arms. He had even quoted poetry to her. On such a night as this- Well, he did n't care; it had not been sham. It was another part of himself. And she? It did not matter what she was to her friends. Last night she had been his strange and lovely playmate.

His wife looked up from the maga

zine.

"A little improbable, don't you think?"

Many things were improbable, he reflected. That room last night, with its flowers and tall candles.

"This is n't my place, you know," she had said. "Shall I tell you the story? It belongs to a school-teacher, a queer little old-maidish person one would have thought if one had seen her in her school-room, no doubt. She invested all her savings in oil stock; and contrary to what you might expect, she made a fortune,—oh, just a little fortune, but enough to last her for the rest of her life. And she bought this house in Greenwich Village, and fitted up this room as a place for romantic things to happen in. But nothing romantic happened. So yesterday, when we met,-she was going away on a visit, and I was in town for a day and a night, on my way somewhere else,-well, we became very quickly acquainted, and she wanted me to stay here. I was thinking of her when you walked into her garden to-night. Shall I tell you? I think that she believed I was the sort of person to whom romantic things do happen, and that if I were

come true, and of two adventurers happy for an uncalendared hour in the phantom world of fancy. The time would come, his reason urged, when this memory would be a thing remote and forgotten, when it would no longer hold for him even the ache of regret, when its pathos even would be faded, as its bright joys were already fading in his thoughts. He would be sorry to have spoken. He would know that he had been a fool to speak. But now, though he lost everything that would one day be dear to him again, he did not care.

He fought against that mad impulse while he could. Then, lest he blurt the thing out suddenly, he began to plan the manner of his confession.

He remembered a fantastic idea uttered that night by the story-writer and he thought, "It will be easier to tell it to her first as a story."

abruptly he ceased speaking. And it seemed to him that even without as yet naming himself, he had confessed his crime of secret rebellion against the wisdom of the world.

He looked up and saw that there were tears in his wife's eyes.

"It 's true," she said. "Women do feel like that."

He was bewildered.

"All women," she went on. “But I did n't think men knew. How did you know?"

He was about to tell her how he knew, when she spoke again, softly. "I'm glad she found so beautiful a lover."

Then he was ashamed, of what, he hardly knew, unless it was of what he seemed to his wife. He realized that he was to her merely what he had labored for twelve years to seem to all the world. Not the foolish adventurer

He began haltingly enough, constrained as he was to present to her imagination these two nameless figures of a man and a woman who had wished rashly for a happiness not to be had within the solid confines of reality; but as he talked, he forgot all else, and his confession became a passionate vindication of the rights of that phantom self for which the workaday world has so little use, and which can achieve only a pitiful and momentary freedom in what the world calls folly. Then, for he had come to the end of his tale, in that picture of a room with its faded flowers and spent candles and a face whose eyes were no longer bright with wild dreams,

that.

He imagined how it would sound to her if he pretended to be that man in the story. It would be the strangest argument in the annals of marriage. He could prove nothing; his secret was fatally secure. She would say, "You have dreamed it, dear."

And seeing himself with her eyes, he was shaken by a doubt. Perhaps it had been just a dream.

VII. Catharsis. But presently a thought of bitter comfort came; he would tell his friend the story-writer, who would do what was after all the only sensible thing to do with a dream in this world, sell it to other dreamers.

And after a time that was what happened.