"
"Then this is afterwards. Heaven has nothing more to give. What is
Heaven? The meeting of those who love--as we have met. I have forgotten
what it was to live before you came----"
"For me, there is nothing to remember between that day and this."
"That day when you fell ill," Unorna said, "the loneliness, the fear for
you----"
Unorna scarcely knew that it had not been she who had parted from him so
long ago. Yet she was playing a part, and in the semi-consciousness of
her deep self-illusion it all seemed as real as a vision in a dream so
often dreamed that it has become part of the dreamer's life. Those
who fall by slow degrees under the power of the all-destroying opium
remember yesterday as being very far, very long past, and recall faint
memories of last year as though a century had lived and perished since
then, seeing confusedly in their own lives the lives of others, and
other existences in their own, until identity is almost gone in the
endless transmigration of their souls from the shadow in one dream-tale
to the wraith of themselves that dreams the next. So, in that hour,
Unorna drifted through the changing scenes that a word had power to call
up, scarce able, and wholly unwilling, to distinguish between her real
and her imaginary self. What matter how? What matter where? The very
questions which at first she had asked herself came now but faintly as
out of an immeasurable distance, and always more faintly still.
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