Daddy called it the cotton-wool of age, you know. Oh, Uncle, I do hope,' she cried with the sudden passion of the child, 'I do hope I shall never, never get into that horrid fog. Ton haven't, and I won't, won't, won't!' Her voice rose to a genuine cry. Then she added with a touch of child-wonder that followed quite naturally upon the outburst, 'How did you ever stop yourself, I wonder!'
'I lived with the fairies in the backwoods,' he answered, laughing softly.
She stared at him with complete admiration in her blue eyes.
'Then I shall grow up 'xactly like you,' she said, 'so that I can always get out of the cage just as you do, even if my body is big.'
'Every one's thin somewhere,' Paul said, remembering her own explanation. 'And the Crack into Yesterday and To-morrow is always close by when it's wanted. That's the real way of escape.'
She clapped her hands and danced, shaking her hair out in a cloud and laughing with happiness. Paul took her in his arms and kissed her. With a gesture of exquisite dignity, such as animals show when they resent human interference, the child tumbled back into her chair by the table, an expression of polite boredom—though the faintest imaginable—in her eyes. Many a time had he seen the kittens behave exactly in the same way.
'But how do you know all these things, Nixie, and where do all your ideas come from?' he asked.
'They just come to me when I'm thinking of nothing in particular. They float into my head of their own accord like ships, little fairy ships, I; suppose. And I think,' she added dreamily after a] moment's pause, 'some of them are trees and flowers whispering to me.' She put her face close to his I own across the table, staring, into his very brain with her shining eyes. 'Don't you think so too, Uncle?'
'I think I do,' he answered honestly.
'Though some of the things I hear,' she went on,' 'I don't understand till a long time afterwards.'
'What kind of things, for instance?'
She hesitated, answering slowly after a pause:
'Things like streams, and the dripping of rain, and the rustling of wet leaves, perhaps. At the time. I only hear the noise they make, but afterwards, when I'm alone, doing nothing, it all falls into words anc stories—all sorts of lovely things, but very hard to remember, of course.'
She broke off and smiled up into his face with charm that he could never have put into words. 'You'll grow up a poet, Nixie,' he said.
'Shall I really? But I could never find the rhymes—simply never.' 'Some never do,' he answered; 'and some—the majority, I think—never find the words even!'
'Oh, how dreadful! 'she exclaimed, her face clouding with a pain she could fully understand. 4 Poets who can't talk at all. I should think they would burst.'
'Some of them nearly do,' he exclaimed, hiding a smile; 'they get very queer indeed, these poor poets who cannot express themselves. I have known one or two.'
'Have you? Oh, Uncle Paul!' Her tone expressed all the solemn sympathy the world could hold.
He nodded his head mysteriously.
The child suddenly sat up very erect. An idea of importance had come into her head.
'Then I wonder if Pouf and Smoke, and Zezette and Mrs. Tompkyns are like that,' she cried, her face grave as a hanging judge—'poets who can't express themselves, and may burst and get queer! Because they understand all that sort of thing—scuttling leaves and dew falling, and tickling grasses and the dreams of beeties, and things we never hear at all. P'raps that's why they lie and listen and think for such ages and ages. I never thought of that before.'
'It's quite likely,' he replied with equal solemnity.
Nixie sprang to her feet and flew round the room from chair to chair, hugging in turn each kitten, and asking it with a passionate earnestness that was very disturbing to its immediate comfort in life: 'Tell me, Pouf, Smoke, Sambo, this instant! Are you all furry little poets who can't tell all your little furry poems? Are you, are you, ARE YOU?'
She kissed each one in turn. 'Are you going to burst and get queer?' She shook them all till, mightily offended, they left their thrones and took cover sedately under tables and sofas well out of' reach of this intimate and public cross-examination. And there they sat, looking straight before them, as though no one else existed in the entire world.
'I believe they are, Uncle.'
A silence fell between them. Under the furniture, safe in their dark corners, the cats began to purr again. Paul got up and strolled to the open window that looked out across lawns and shrubberies to the fringe of oaks and elms that marked the distant hayfields. The rain still fell gently, silently—a fine, scented, melancholy rain; the rain of a minor key. Tinged with a hundred delicate odours from fields and trees—ghostly perfumes far more subtle than the perfumes of flowers—the air seemed to brush the surface of his soul, dropping its fragrance down into his heart like the close presence of remembered friends.
The evening mode invaded him softly, soothingly; and out of it, in some way he scarcely understood, crept something that brought a vague disquiet in its train. A little timid thought stole to the threshold of his heart and knocked gently upon the door of its very inmost chamber. And the sound of the knocking, faint and muffled though it was, woke echoes in this secret chamber that proclaimed in a tone of reproach, if not almost of warning, that it was still empty and unfurnished. A deep, infinite yearning, and a yearning that was new, stirred within him, then suddenly rose to the surface of his mind like a voice calling to him from far away out of mist and darkness.
'If only I had children of my own. . .!' it called; and the echo whispered afterwards 'of my very own, made out of my very thoughts. . . .!'
He turned to Nixie who had followed, and now leaned beside him on the window-sill.
'So the language of wind and trees and water you translate afterwards into stories, do you?' he asked, taking up the conversation where they had left it. It was hardly a question; he was musing aloud as he gazed out into the mists that gathered with the dusk. 'It's all silent enough now, at any rate there's not a breath of air moving. The trees are dreaming—dreaming perhaps of the Dance of the Winds, or of the love-making of the snow when their leaves are gone and the flakes settle softly on the bare twigs; or perhaps dreaming of the humming of the sap that brings their new clothes with such 'a rush of glory and wonder in the spring' Again the child looked up into his face with shining eyes. The magic of her little treasured beliefs had touched the depths of him, and she felt that they were in the same world together, without pretence and without the barriers of age. She was radiantly happy, and rather wonderful into the bargain, a fairy if ever there was one.
'They're just thinking,' she said softly.
'So trees think too?'
She nodded her head, leaning her chin on her hands as she gazed with him into the misty air.
'I wonder what their thoughts are like,' he said musingly, so that she could take it for a question or not as she chose.
'Like ours—in a way,' she answered, as though speaking of something she knew beyond all question, 'only not so small, not so sharp. Our thoughts prick, I think, but theirs stroke, all running quite smoothly into each other. Very big and wonderful-indeed thoughts—big as wind, I mean, and wonderful as sky or distance. And the streams—the streams have long, winding thoughts that run down their whole
