a moment from his breathless entrance, and a subtle pleasure began to steal through his veins. It seemed as if every yearning he had ever known was being ministered to by competent unseen Presences; and, obviously, the children and the cats—Mrs. Tompkyns had somehow managed to join Smoke—felt likewise, for their countenances beamed and blinked supreme contentment.
'Ah!' observed Jonah, sitting contentedly on the grass beside him. 'This is the place.' He heaved a happy little sigh, as though the statement were incontrovertible.
'It is,' echoed Paul. And Nixie's eyes shone like blue flowers in a field of spring.
'The crack's smaller than it used to be though,' he heard her murmuring to herself. 'Every year it's harder to get through. I suppose something's happening to the world—or to people; some change going on'
'Or we're getting older,' Jonah put in with pro-founder wisdom than he knew.
Paul congratulated himself upon his successful entrance. He felt something of a dog! The bank on which he lay sloped down towards a river fledged with reeds and flowers; its waters, blue as the sky, flowed rippling by, and a soft wind, warm and] scented, sighed over it from the heart of the summer. On the opposite shore, not fifty yards across, a grove of larches swayed their slender branches lazily in the sun, and a little farther down the banks he saw a line of willows drooping down to moisten their tongue-like leaves. The air hummed pleasantly with insects; birds flashed to and fro, singing as they flew; and, in the distance, across miles of blue meadowlands, hills rose in shadowy outline to the sky. He feasted on the beauty of it all, absorbing it through every sense.
'But where are we?' he asked at length, 'because a moment ago we were in a storm somewhere?' He turned to Nixie who still Jay talking to herself contentedly at his side. 'And what really happens here? 'he added with a blush. 'I feel so extraordinarily happy.'
They lay half-buried among the sweet-scented grasses. Jonah burrowed along the shore at some game of his own close by, and the cats made a busy pretence of hunting wild game in a dozen places at once, and then suddenly basking in the sun and washing each other's necks and backs as though wild-game hunting were a bore.
'Nothing 'xactly—happens, she answered, and her voice sounded curiously like wind in rushes—'but everything—is. 1
It seemed to him as though he listened to some spirit of the ages, very wise with the wisdom of eternal youth, that spoke to him through the pretty little mouth of this rosy-faced child.
'It's like that river,' she went on, pointing to the blue streak winding far away in a ribbon through the landscape, 'which flows on for ever in a circle, and never comes to an end. Everything here goes on always, and then always begins again.'
For the river, as Paul afterwards found out, ran on for miles and miles, in the curves of an immense circle, of which the sea itself was apparently nothing but a widening of certain portions.
'So here,' continued the child, making a pattern with daisies on his sleeve as she talked, 'you can go over anything you like again and again, and it need never come to an end at all. Only,' she added, looking up gravely into his face, 'you must really, really want it to start with.'
'Without getting tired?' he asked, wonderingly.
'Of course; because you begin over and over again with it.' 'Delightful!' he exclaimed, 'that means a place of eternal youth, where emotions continually renew themselves.'
'It's the place where you find lost things,' she explained, with a little puzzled laugh at his foolish long words, 'and where things that came to! no proper sort of end—things that didn't come true, I mean, in the world, all happen and enjoy them—' selves '
He sat up with a jerk, forgetting the carefully arranged daisies on his coat, and scattering them all 'over the grass.
'But this is too splendid!' he cried. 'This is what I've always been looking for. It's what I was thinking about just now when I tried to write a poem and couldn't.'
'We found it long ago,' said the child, pointing to Jonah and Mrs. Tompkyns, Smoke having mysteriously disappeared for the moment. 'We' live here really most of the time. Daddy brought; us here first.'
'Things life promised, but never gave, here come to full fruition,'Paul murmured to himself. 'You: mean,' he added aloud, 'this is where ideals that have gone astray among the years may be found again, and actually realised? A kingdom of heaven within the heart? 'He was very excited, and forgot for the moment he was speaking to a child.
'I don't know about all that,' she answered, with a puzzled look. 'But it is life. We live-happily-ever-after here. That's what I mean.'
'It all comes true here?'
'All, all, all. All broken things and all lost things come here and are happy again,' she went on eagerly; 'and if you look hard enough you can find 'xactly what you want and 'xactly what you lost. And once you've found it, nothing can break it or lose it again.'
Paul stared, understanding that the voice speaking through her was greater than she knew.
'And some things are lost, we think,' she added, 'simply because they were wanted—wanted very much indeed, but never got.'
'Yet these are certainly the words of a child,' he reflected, wonder and delight equally mingled,' and of a child tumbling about among great spiritual things in a simple, intuitive fashion without knowing it.'
'All the things that ought to happen, but never do happen,' she went on, picking up the scattered daisies and making the pattern anew on a different part of his coat. 'They all are found here.'
'Wishes, dreams, ideals?' he asked, more to see what answer she would make than because he didn't understand.
'I suppose that's the same thing,' she replied. 'But, now please Uncle Paul, keep still a minute or I can't possibly finish this crown the daisies want me to make for them.' Paul stared into her eyes and saw through them to the blue of the sky and the blue of the winding river beyond; through to the hills on the horizon, a deeper blue still; and thence into the softer blue shadows that lay over the timeless land buried in the distances of his own heart, where things might indeed come true beyond all reach of misadventure or decay. For this, of course, was the real land of wonder and imagination, where everything might happen and nothing need grow old. The vision of the poet saw . . . far—far . . .
All this he realised through the blue eyes of the child at his side, who was playing with daisies and talking about the make-believe of children. His being swam out into the sunshine of great distances, of endless possibilities, all of which he might be able afterwards to interpret to others who did not see so far, or so clearly, as himself. He began to realise that his spirit, like the endless river at his feet, was without end or beginning. Thrills of new life poured into him from all sides.
'And when we go back,' he heard the musical little voice saying beside him, 'that church will be striking exactly where we left it—the sixth stroke, I mean.'
'Of course; I see!' cried Paul, beginning to realise the full value of his discovery, 'for there's no time here, is there? Nothing grows old.'
'That's it,' she laughed, clapping her hands, 'and you can find all the lost and broken things you want, if you look hard and—really want them.'
'I want a lot,' he mused, still staring into the little wells of blue opposite; 'the kind that are lost because they've never been "got," 'he added with a smile, using her own word.
'For
