'I feel joined on to everything,' she replied, half singing it in her joy. 'I feel tucked into the universe everywhere, and into you, dear. These rays of starlight have sewn us together.' She began to tremble, but it was the trembling of pure joy and not of alarm.... 'Yes,' he said, 'I'm learning it too. The moment thought gets away from self it lets in starlight and makes room for happiness. To think with sympathy of others is to grow: you take in their experience and add it to your own--development; the heart gets soft and deep and wide till you feel the entire universe buttoning its jacket round you. To think of self means friction and hence reduction.' 'And your Story,' she added, glancing up proudly at the banner that they trailed. 'I have helped a little, haven't I?' 'It's nearly finished,' he flashed back; 'you've been its inspiration and its climax. All these years, when we thought ourselves apart, you've been helping really underground--that's true collaboration.' 'Our little separation was but a _reculer pour mieux sauter_. See how we've rushed together again!' A strange soft singing, like the wind in firs, or like shallow water flowing over pebbles, interrupted them. The sweetness of it turned the night alive. 'Come on, old Mother. Our Leader is calling to us. We must work.' They slid from the blue wind into a current of paler air that happened to slip swiftly past them, and went towards the forest where Mlle. Lemaire waited for them. Mother waved her hand to her friend, settled comfortably upon the flat roof in the village in their rear. 'We'll come back to lean upon you when we're tired,' she signalled. But she felt no envy now. In future she would certainly never 'stay put.' Work beckoned to her--and such endless, glorious work: the whole Universe. 'What life! What a rush of splendour!' she exclaimed as they reached the great woods and heard them shouting below in the winds. 'I see now why the forest always comforted me. There's strength here I can take back into my body with me when I go.' 'The trees, yes, express visibly only a portion of their life,' he told her. 'There is an overflow we can appropriate.' Yet their conversation was never audibly uttered. It flashed instantaneously from one to the other. All they had exchanged since leaving La Citadelle had taken place at once, it seemed. They were awake in the region of naked thought and feeling. The dictum of the materialists that thought and feeling cannot exist apart from matter did not trouble them. Matter, they saw, was everywhere, though too tenuous for any measuring instrument man's brain had yet invented. 'Come on!' he repeated; 'the Starlight Express is waiting. It will take you anywhere you please--Ireland if you like!'