While their words skimmed jerkily above the subjects in which they were really interested, and their thoughts weighed, appraised, and at times depreciated, more deeply, an even more underlying, more ancient set of forces were at work. Eyes talk a language that thoughts would deny; certain proximities bind closer than the unthinking iron to the insensate magnet; above and below speech and meditation, unseen selves meet, measure, and mate, dragging tardy consciousness into situations it thinks are of its planning. These calls and greetings date back of life's long blundering on the harsh land, back to the life-cradling sea: they speak with the unconscious weight of slow millenniums of mindless love. They are kin to the cord that binds the falling apple to the earth, the earth to the sun, the sun to the far starry outposts of the visible universe, and it to the invisible majesty beyond. The infinite pull of material attraction does not sleep: nor do these forces tire of their ancient tasks. Love, rooted deep in life, and born of older ties, does not cease its endless search, its tenacious intangible clasp of what it needs to round its unique need into a blent ecstasy. There are those who deny romance to a love kin to gravitation and issue of insect matings. They are this far right, that romance is a late by-blow of the ageless creative hunger. Pelham took Jane back conscientiously shortly after eleven. They had not mentioned the mining situation. The silent hours after their parting were full of the subtle working of those hidden forces whose power they had begun to feel, there upon the narrow coping above the little park. X The next morning, Pelham put in a requisition at the library for the book he had commenced. Within the week he received it. It was thrilling reading--setting at war, in each chapter, his keen mind, which approved at once of its unanswerable insight, and his emotions and prejudices, which balked and struggled against the shattering, one by one, of their ancient idols. It was slow reading: he would finish a chapter, the greater part of him ready to scoff at its conclusions, which must be based upon sophistries; and then, to detect the latent fallacies, he would go over it at once, and find that the rereading merely riveted the intellectual effect the first perusal had produced.