They had dinner. When it was over Drew went with Linden into his study. The three others lingered a little in the pleasant, wide hall. The day was again right October; amber and garnet and sapphire; balm with nothing of lethargy. Said Curtin, "When we come and come, what do you do at last?" Marget laughed. "Oh, you come and go! You never really go, you know! But you have to take your bodies here and there over earth. But once come, we keep you and you keep us!" "You know people all over the earth?" "Yes." "Do they write?" "Oh, now one and now another writes! But we hardly need letters. That is, they are needed, of course, for minute information, for news of bodily movement. But there is communion whether we write or not." Marget returned to the dining room to talk with Zinia. Anna Darcy went up to her chamber for her rest, and Curtin took his book to the porch. The books at Sweet Rocket. He fell to pondering them. There were, perhaps, five thousand, not in one room, but up and down. Many were old, and many neither old nor new, and many new. They seemed to touch all subjects. Curtin, pondering, going deeper and deeper, fell into some border country of Reality. With swiftness, with electric shock, he touched, not thousands of leaves of paper printed over, but conscious, intelligent, and powerful life. Or rather, it seemed to touch, to descend upon him, to well through him, coming down, coming from within, occupying space internal to all this tranquil, outer, October space. It was presence, it was personality, overwhelming. Books! What were true books? Will, Desire, Intelligence, living, active, not unclothed or unbodied, living Presence, present Activity, being in mass, active being, present and active here in this valley and present and active elsewhere, present and active throughout he knew not what infinity! He felt again that wide and deep shock of reality. The world lived!--had always lived--only he had not known it. Vigor streamed into vein and nerve. He sprang to his feet, and, leaving the porch, moved down past the cedars to the river path, and along it. "It is not Richard Linden and Marget Land, nor the one nor the other! It is all of us. It is the Whole. The Whole has found them and is bringing them in accord." He felt exquisitely a touch of bliss. "It will bring me in accord, too. Drew and Miss Darcy and me--and many others." He felt a satisfaction such as he had never dreamed. "All others. One by one, all accorded, all remembered. The Already Remembered, forever increasing in strength, gathering, drawing, the scattered and fragmentary and incipient!" He walked, hardly knowing that he walked. "Goodness and largeness! The dawn of them is synchronous with the dawn of Allness. All our words, mercy, justice, love, wisdom, power, joy, are but terms for the natural, habitual feeling of the One who is Whole. It is not that they are 'virtues'! They are the hue and tone and sense of health!"