'No, it isn't,' answered the voice beside him. 'The point is that he has thought it, and the universe is richer. Even if others do not read or understand, what he has thought _is there now_, for ever and ever.' 'True,' he reflected, 'for that Beauty may float down and settle in other minds when they least are looking for it, and ignoring utterly whence comes the fairy touch. Divine! Delicious! Heavenly!' 'The Beauty he has written came through you, yet was not yours,' the voice continued very faintly. 'A far more beautiful mind first projected it into that network which binds all minds together. 'Twas thence you caught it flying, and, knowing not how to give it shape, transferred it to another--who could use it--for others.... Thought is Life, and Sympathy is living....' The voice died away; he could not hear the remainder clearly; the passing scenery caught his attention again; during his reverie it had been unnoticed utterly. 'Thought is Life, but Sympathy is living---' it rolled and poured through him as he repeated it. Snatches of another sentence then came rising into him from an immense distance, falling upon him from immeasurable heights--barely audible:- '... from a mind that so loved the Pleiades she made their loveliness and joy her own... Alcyone, Merope, Maia...' It dipped away into silence like a flower closing for the night, and the train, he realised, was slackening speed as it drew into the hideous Gare de Lyon. 'I'll talk to Minks about it, perhaps,' he thought, as he stood telling the Customs official that he had no brandy, cigarettes, or lace. 'He knows about things like that. At any rate, he'll sympathise.' He went across Paris to the Gare du Nord, and caught the afternoon boat train to London. The sunshine glared up from the baking streets, but he never forgot that overhead, though invisible, the stars were shining all the time--Starlight, the most tender and least suspected light in all the world, shining bravely even when obscured by the Interfering Sun, and the Pleiades, softest, sweetest little group among them all. And when at eleven o'clock he entered his St. James's flat, he took a store of it shining in his heart, and therefore in his eyes. Only that was no difficult matter, for all the lamps far up the heights were lit and gleaming, and caught old mighty London in their gorgeous net. CHAPTER XXIX Think with passion That shall fashion Life's entire design, well planned. _Woman of the Haystack_. 'You are looking so wonderfully well, Mr. Rogers,' Minks observed at Charing Cross Station, 'the passage across the Channel, I trust, was calm.' 'And yourself and Mrs. Minks?' asked Rogers, looking into the equally sunburned face of his secretary, remembering suddenly that he had been to the sea with his family; 'Frank, too, and the other children? All well, I hope?' 'All in excellent health, Mr. Rogers, thanks to your generous thought. My wife---'