the very surface of his skin to all with whom he came in contact. His sister, especially, and the children felt the comfort of his presence. They followed him about from room to room; they clung close; they were instinctively aware that peace and strength emanated from him, though little guessing the real source of his serene and tranquil atmosphere.
For, of course, he told no one of what had happened. During the day, indeed, it lay in him submerged and unassertive, like the presence of some great glowing secret, feeding the sources of energy for all his little outward duties and activities, yet never claiming individual attention itself. Only with the fall of night, when the doings of the day were instinctively laid aside like a garment no longer required, did it again swim up upon him out of the depths, and speak.
'Now!' he heard the tiny singing voice, 'we can be alone. Your body's tired. I can get closer to you.'
'I've felt you by me all day, though,' he said, as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
'Of course,' came the answering whisper, soft as moonlight, 'because I never left you for a single moment. I was in everything you did—in your very words. Once or twice, I even got into mother too, through you and made her feel better. Wasn't that splendid?'
Paul longed to give the child one of his old hugs—to feel her little warm and sunny body pressed against his own. Instead, her laughter echoed suddenly all about the room.
'That's impossible now! 'he heard. 'I'm ever so much closer this way. You'll soon get used to it, you know!'
This spontaneous laughter was the music to which all their talks were set. He laughed too, and blew the candles out.
'I tried very hard to say the true things,' he murmured, referring to her remark about comforting his sister.
'I know you did. That's how I got into her—through you. You must go on and on trying. In the end we'll get her all soft and happy again. She'll feel me without knowing it.'
Suddenly it struck him that, although the room was dark, he did not see the light of the little torch as before. He missed it. He was just going to ask why it was absent when the child caught his thought and replied of her own accord:
'Because it's spread all over now, instead of being just a point. You are in it, I mean. There's light everywhere about you now, and I see you much clearer than last time.'
The explanation described exactly what he felt himself.
'Let them in, please,' Nixie suddenly interrupted his thoughts again. 'They're both coming up the stairs. It was very naughty of you to forget them, you know.'
After a moment of puzzled hesitation he understood what she meant, and was out of bed and across the floor. He did not wait to light a candle, but opened the door and stood there waiting in the darkness. Almost at once two soft, furry things brushed past his feet as Smoke, followed by Mrs. Tompkyns, marched into the room, uttering that curious sharp sound of pleasure which is something between a purr and a cry. They disappeared among the shadows beyond the fireplace, and Paul sprang back into bed again pleased that they were there, yet annoyed with himself for having forgotten them.
'But it was my fault really' she laughed. 'I've been with them out in the garden, and they've only just got in through the pantry window. My presence excites them awfully. Oh, it's all right,' she added quickly, in reply to his further thought; 'Barker's very late to-night doing the silver. But he'll shut the window before he goes.'
It was his turn to laugh. She had caught his thought about the window almost before it reached the surface of his mind. Moreover, he found that both Mrs. Tompkyns and Smoke had very cold wet soles under their padded little feet.
In this way, most strangely, sweetly, naturally, even the trivial details of their daily life as they had always known it together, intermingled with the talk that was often very earnest, mystical, and pregnant with meanings. It was in every sense a continuation of their former relationship, touched on her side with a greater knowledge—almost as though she had suddenly developed to the point she might have reached in time upon the earth; on his side, with a delicate sense of accepting guidance from some one with greater privileges than himself, who had come back on purpose to help and inspire him.
For more and more it seemed to partake of the nature of genuine inspiration. Speech came direct and swift as thought, without hesitation or stammering as in the flesh. She told him many things, often quaintly enough expressed, but that yet seemed to hold the kernel of deep truths. There had never been the least break in their companionship, it seemed.
'I knew all this before,' she said, after a singular exchange of questions and answers about the nature of communion with invisible sources of mood and feeling, 'only I suppose my brain had not got big enough, or whatever it was, to tell it. Like your poets you used to tell me about who couldn't find their rhymes, perhaps.'
And her laughter flowed about him in a rippling flood that instantly woke his own. They always laughed. They felt so happy. It was a communion between old souls that surely had bathed deeply in the experiences of life before they had become imprisoned in the particular bodies known as Paul Rivers and Margaret Christina Messenger.
He became convinced, too, more and more that she really did not speak at all—that no actual sound set the waves of air in motion—but that she put her words into him in the form of thoughts, and that he it was, in order to grasp them clearly, who clothed them with the symbols of sound and language. It was essentially of the nature of inspiration. She blew the ideas into his heart and mind.
And many things that he asked her were undoubtedly little more than his own thoughts, half-formed and vague, lying in the depths of him.
'Then, over there, where you now are, is it—more real? Are you, as it were, one stage nearer to the great Reality? What's it like?'
'It's through the real "Crack," I think,' she answered. 'Everything is here that I imagined—but really imagined—on earth. And people who imagined nothing, or wanted only the world, find very little here.'
'Then is the change very great?'
'It doesn't seem to me like a change at all. I've been here before for visits. Now I've come to stay, that's all!'
'You yourself have not changed? '
She roared with laughter, till he felt that his question was really absurd.
'Of course not! How can I change? I'm always Nixie, wherever I am!'
'But you feel different?' he insisted.
'I feel better,' she answered, still laughing. 'I feel awfully jolly.' Then after a long pause he asked another question. It was really a question he was always asking in one form or another, only he had never yet put it so directly perhaps. He whispered it from a grave and solemn heart:
'Are you nearer to—God, do you think?'
It was a word he rarely used. In his conversations with the child on earth he had never once used it. She waited a long time before replying. Instinctively, very subtly, it came to him that she did not know exactly what he meant.
'I'm in and with Everything there is—Everywhere,' she said softly. 'And I couldn't possibly be nearer to anything than I am.'
More than that she could not explain, and Paul never asked similar questions again. He understood that they were really unanswerable.
And
