here in our secret valley you may welcome her without alarm. The cosmic organism, denied by civilisation, survives in you as it survives also in myself and in--my wife. Through that, and through that alone, is the experiment possible to us.” And it flashed into me that my visit to this enchanted valley would witness no concentrated, miniature “ceremonial,” reduced in form for worship as in a church or temple, but that all we did and experienced in the course of normal, every-day life would mark the outlines of this vast performance. Understanding would come that way. And then the mention of his “wife” brought me sharply back to emotions of--another kind. My thought leaped back again--by what steps I cannot say, it seemed so disconnected with what had just occupied my mind--to his statement of ten minutes before. “By becoming them,” I asked, “you mean that you must feel-with wind and fire to the point of being them?” “You think this might be done alone, without your help or hers?” he asked, picking the thought straight out of my mind. “But only a group could have done what we did--a group, moreover, in perfect sympathy. For as love between the three of us was essential to success then, so is love between us essential now. A group, combined by love into a unit, exerts a power impossible to an individual. The secret of our power lies in that--ideal love and perfect sympathy.” I listened, sure of one thing only--that I would keep an open mind. To deny, object, criticise, above all to ridicule would rob me of an experience. I believe honestly this was my attitude: to miss no value that might be in it by assuming it was nonsense merely because it was so strange. Apart from the curious fact that something in me was sympathetic to a whole world of deep ideas behind his language, I felt the determined desire to see the matter through. There was no creed or religious dogma in me to offend. I made myself receptive. For, out of this singular exposition the conviction grew that I was entering almost a new order of existence, and that an earlier mode of consciousness revived. In this lonely valley, untouched by the currents of modern thought and feeling, companioned by Julius LeVallon and that old, recovered soul, his wife, the conditions of our previous existence together perhaps re-formed themselves. Behind his talk came ideas that wore an aspect of familiarity, although my present brain, try as it might, failed to mould them into any acceptable form. The increasing change in myself was certainly significant. The crumbling of old shibboleths continued. A relationship between my inner nature and the valley seemed established in some way that was new, yet not entirely forgotten. The very sunlight and the wind assisted. Closer to the natural things I felt, the earth not alien to me....