But it was not alone on the subject of music that the stranger and child drew together. One could not, for that matter, always be harping; and in the intervals, at odd times, they conversed much, and familiarly, and generally on recondite themes. They were both, in their different ages and degrees, mystics--the older from temperament, the younger from his spiritual isolation. Lying there through the age-long seasons, what commune was possible to him but with fancies and unrealities? The world was a shadow to him; only his dreams were actual. For them his fruitfullest pastures lay in the spars and splinters of jewelled light which glowed from the stained glass in the casement. Thence he gathered, or thereinto read, the strange phantasies which haunted his brain--thoughts and visions which were like things glimpsed from beyond the veil. This glass was old work, acquired piecemeal from many sources, and let into the upper halves of the windows, without correlation in its parts and with no regard but for effect--a disarrangement infinitely more suggestive than any formal pattern. A few leaves, a golden apple, a section of trellis, a hand grasping a sword-hilt, here and there a head of saint or warrior--such, interspersed with spaces of plain glass, crimson, or deep blue, or sunny yellow, formed the embroidered patchwork for a thousand fancies to play about. One had to remember, hearing the child’s strange brooding rhapsodies thereon, the years which his shrunken appearance belied. Moreover, the intellectual light in him, as is frequently the case with cripples, was precocious, abnormally brilliant. And though he confessed his dreams to a lesser intellect, it was to a corresponding sympathy. The simple of heart are often the purest of vision. Bright wits must whet themselves on the concrete; they cannot sharpen on abstractions. It is for the unworldly to know what they cannot speak. And so it was with this harpist. There was one fragment which, more than any other, fascinated the boy. It was in colour a splendid azure, mysteriously liquid, and on it hung from nowhere a little white hand, minutely finished to the nails. Whose had it been--what queen’s or angel’s? “Sometimes,” he would say, “when the lamp is low and there is moonlight in the street, I see it move; and then a shadow grows above, and out of it a face, too dim to distinguish; but if I shut my eyes, I know it has come down and is bending over me.” “The Lady Mother, belike, Colin.” “Think you so, dear Jack? It were sweet to have a mother in my room. Do you ever see faces, framed in little blots of light, when you close your lids hard?” “Surely I do!” “What are they? Whence do they come? I have no memories of such in all my life. They are strangers to me, yet as clear and actual as yours I look on now. Human--the faces of men and women--some good, some evil; but, if I try to hold and fix ’em, they slide and melt, this one laughing, that wickedly deriding.”