Barbara had passed by it several times lately, and looked at it with speculative interest. She thought of a house as the shell of the mind that inhabited it. Greystones was the cipher of her great-grandmother's personality. The old woman had made it what it was, had given it an atmosphere of a wild, yet living, past. What would Peter make of the little green-bowered cot in Cringel Forest? She pondered upon Peter all through the day, which sped with winged feet. In the evening Barbara went home. Swirtle Tarn smoked like a cauldron of boiling water as she threaded its lonely shore. The vapour swirled up in spiral form, and when it reached the light of the moon, appeared most strange and beautiful, like columns of white marble rising from a floor of polished blue stone. It was late, and Lucy must have gone to bed some time ago; yet she would linger for a while to enjoy the beauty of the night. The air was very still; even the waterfalls were subdued; the birds were silent; the flocks were asleep; everything looked unsubstantial. Barbara thought that she had never before felt quite the same sense of mystery in the night. Surely that which she looked upon was not the material form of the earth, but its spiritual body! Were not those white vapours its thoughts going up to the Eternal Being who gave them? All thoughts had the same origin. The universe was full of them, but only into the receptive mind could they come. There they worked magic, were humanized themselves, while they spiritualized the human being in whose brain they lodged. And having suffered this metamorphosis, they flowed back again, as the glistening vapours flowed back to their source. Thus man and his Creator come into touch with each other. The Creator gives the thought, the creature returns it with its own interpretation thereof. So man is made spiritual, and God human. Such ideas as these were the outcome of Barbara's conversations with Timothy. But she did not accept his many strange statements without question. She pondered them for days, coloured them with her own imagination, absorbed them at length into her own personality. This gave her beliefs the force of experience. Barbara went home. Lucy had gone to bed but she was not asleep. Nevertheless, she shut her eyes, and made no movement when her sister entered their room. She knew that Barbara was bending over her, that Barbara's face was full of compassion for her sorrow. But she was too weary with weeping to long for anything save silence, and a corner where she could indulge her tears unseen.