I feel this splendid guesser will be some inspired musician of the future, as simple as a little child in all things but his knowledge of the power of sound; but even little children will have learned much in those days. He will want new notes and find them--new notes between the black and white keys. He will go blind like Milton and Homer, and deaf like Beethoven; and then, all in the stillness and the dark, all in the depths of his forlorn and lonely soul, he will make his best music, and out of the endless mazes of its counterpoint he will evolve a secret, as we did from the "Chant du Triste Commensal," but it will be a greater secret than ours. Others will have been very near this hidden treasure; but he will happen right _on_ it, and unearth it, and bring it to light. I think I see him sitting at the key-board, so familiar of old to the feel of his consummate fingers; painfully dictating his score to some most patient and devoted friend--mother, sister, daughter, wife--that score that he will never see or hear. What a stammerer! Not only blind and deaf, but _mad_--mad in the world's eyes, for fifty, a hundred, a thousand years. Time is nothing; but that score will survive.... He will die of it, of course; and when he dies and comes to us, there will be joy from here to Sirius, and beyond. And one day they will find out on earth that he was only deaf and blind--not mad at all. They will hear and _understand_--they will know that he saw and heard as none had ever heard or seen before! * * * * * For 'as we sow we reap'; that is a true saying, and all the sowing is done here on earth, and the reaping beyond. Man is a grub; his dead clay, as he lies coffined in his grave, is the left-off cocoon he has spun for himself during his earthly life, to burst open and soar from with all his memories about him, even his lost ones. Like the dragon-fly, the butterfly, the moth ... and when _they_ die it is the same, and the same with a blade of grass. We are all, _tous tant que nous sommes_, little bags of remembrance that never dies; that's what we're _for_. But we can only bring with us to the common stock what we've got. As Pere Francois used to say, 'La plus belle fille au monde ne peut donner que ce qu'elle a.' * * * * * Besides all this I am your earthly wife, Gogo--your loving, faithful, devoted wife, and I wish it to be known. * * * * * And then at last, in the fulness of time--a very few years--ah, then---- "Once more shall Neuha lead her Torquil by the hand." * * * * * "Oh, Mary!" I cried, "shall we be transcendently happy again? As happy as we were--_happier_ even?"