the hour—a sound utterly alien to the trend of his thoughts—brought him back again to the present. He heard it across many fields, fields that had been tilled for centuries, and there could have been no more vivid or eloquent reminder that he was no longer in a land where hedges, church bells, notice-boards, and so forth were not. He came back with a start, and a sensation almost akin to pain. He felt cramped, caught, caged. The tinkling church bells annoyed him.
His thoughts turned, with a sudden jerk, as it were, to the undeniable fact that he had been trying to go about in a disguise, with a clumsy mask over his face, so that he might appear decently grown up in his new surroundings.
A pair of owls began to hoot softly in the woods, answering one another like voices in a dream, and just then the lost wind left the pine branches and died away into the sky with a swift rush as of many small wings. In the sudden pool of silence that followed, he fancied he could hear across the dark miles of heathland the continuous low murmur of the sea.
The beauty of night, as ever, entered his soul, but with a joy that was too solemn, too moving, to be felt as pleasure. It touched something in him beyond the tears of either pain or delight: something that held in it a mysterious wonder so searching, so poignant, as to be almost terrible.
He caught his breath and waited. . . . The great woods of the world, mountains, the sea, stars, and the crying winds were always for him symbols of the gateways into a mightier and ideal region, a Beyond-world where he found rest for his yearnings and a strange peace. They were his means of losing himself in a temporary heaven.
And to-night it was the beauty of an English scene that carried him away; and this in spite of his having summoned the wilder vision from across the seas. Already the forces of his own country were insensibly at work upon an impressionable mind and temperament. The very air, so sweetly scented as he drew it in between his lips, was charged with the subtly - working influences of the 'Old Country.' A new web, soft but mighty, was being woven about his spirit. Even now his heart was conscious of its gossamer touch, as his dreams yielded imperceptibly to a new colour.
He followed vaguely, curiously, the leadings of delicate emotions that had been stirred in him by the events of the day. Symbols, fast - shifting, protean, passed in suggestive procession before his mind's eye, in the way that symbols ever will—in a poet's heart. He thought of children, of the children, and of the extraordinarily fresh appeal they had made to him. Children: how near they, too, stood to the great things of life, and all the nearer, perhaps, for not being aware of it. How their far-seeing eyes and their simple, unlined souls pointed the way, like Nature, to the ideal region of which he was always dreaming: to Reality, to God.
All real children knew and understood; were ready to offer their timid yet unhesitating guidance, and without question or explanation.
Had, then, Nixie and her troupe already taken him prisoner? And were the soft chains already twined about his neck? . . .
Paul hardly acknowledged the question definitely to himself. He was merely dreaming, and his dreams, rising and falling like the tides of a sea, bore him to and fro among the shoals and inlands of the day's events. The spell of the English June night was very strong upon him, no doubt, for presently a door opened somewhere behind him, and the very children he was thinking about danced softly into the room. Nixie came up close and gazed into his very eyes, and again there began that odd singing in his heart that he had twice noticed during the day. An atmosphere of magic, shot with gold and silver, came with the child into the room.
For the fact was—though he realised it only dimly—the Fates were now making him a deliberate offer. Had he not been so absorbed, he would have perceived and appreciated the delicacy of their action. As a rule they command, whereas now they were only suggesting.
It was really his own heart asking. Here, in this rambling country house under the hills, was an opportunity of entering the region to which all that was best and truest in him naturally belonged. The experience might prove a stepping-stone to a final readjustment of his peculiar being with the normal busy world of common things. Here was a safety-valve, as he called it, a channel through which he might express much, if not all, of his accumulated stores. The guides, now fast asleep in their beds, had sent out their little dream-bodies to bring the invitation; they were ready and waiting.
And he, thinking there under the stars his queer, long thoughts, bred in years of solitude, dallied with the invitation, and—hesitated. The inevitable pain frightened him—the pain of being young when the world cries that you are old; the pang of the eternal contrast when the world would laugh at what seemed to it a foolish fantasy of youth—a pose, a dream that must bring a bitter awakening! He heard the voices but too plainly, and shrank quickly from the sound.
But Nixie, standing there beside him with such gentle persistence, certainly made him waver. . . . The temptation to yield was strong and seductive. . . . Yet, when the faint splendour of the summer moonrise dimmed the stars near the horizon, and the pines shone tipped with silver, he found himself borne down by the sense of caution that urged no revolutionary change, and advised him to keep his armour tightly buckled on in the disguise he had adopted.
He would wait and see—a little longer, at any rate; and meanwhile he must be firm and stern and dull; master of himself, and apparently normal.
He walked to the dressing-table and lit his candles, and, as he did so, caught a picture of himself in the glass. There was a gleam of subdued fire in his eyes, he thought, that was not naturally there. Something about him looked a little wild; it made him laugh.
He laughed to think how utterly absurd it was that a man of his size and age, and—But the idea refused to frame himself in language—He did not know exactly why he laughed, for at the same time he felt sad. With him, as with all other children, tears and laughter are never far apart. It would have been just as intelligible if he had cried.
But when the candles were out and he was in bed, and the stars were peeping into the darkened room, the memory of his laughter seemed unreal, and the sound of it oddly remote.
For, after all, that laughter was rather mysterious. It was not the Outer Paul laughing at the Inner Paul. It was the Inner Paul laughing with himself.
CHAPTER VII
The imaginative process may be likened to the state of reverie.
—ALISON.
The psychology of sleep being apparently beyond all intelligible explanation, it was not surprising that he woke up next morning as though he had gone to bed without a single perplexity. He remembered none of the thoughts that had thronged his brain a few short hours before; perhaps they had all slipped down into the region of submerged consciousness, to crop out later in natural, and apparently spontaneous, action.
At any rate he remembered little enough of his troubles when he woke and saw the fair English sun streaming in through the open windows. Odours of woods and dew-drenched lawns came into the room, and the birds were singing with noise enough to waken all the country-side. It was impossible to lie in bed. He was up and dressed long before any servant came to call him.
Downstairs he found the house in darkness; doors barred and windows heavily shuttered as though the house had expected an attack. Not a soul was stirring. The air was close and musty. The idea of having to strike a match in a 'country' house at 6 A.M. somehow oppressed him. Not knowing his way about very well yet, he stumbled across the hall to find a door, and as he did so something soft came rubbing against his legs. He put his hand down in the darkness and felt a furry, warm body and a stiff upright tail that reached almost to his knees. The thing began to purr.
'I declare!' he exclaimed; 'Mrs. Tompkyns!' and he struck a match and followed her to the drawing-room door. A moment later they had unfastened the shutters of the French window—Mrs. Tompkyns assisting by standing on her hind legs and tapping the swinging bell—and made their way out on to the lawn.
The sunshine came slanting between the cedar and lay in shining