"Dear me," said Margaret, "please be human, Jimmy. I've been sitting here all day trying to be good, whereas I'm just crazy for a game of cricket. Do you remember when you bowled, and raised a lump on my shin as big as an egg?" He looked up into her face, and though she heard a little quivering sigh his eyes seemed to be laughing. "You were Peggy, and I was Jimmy then, when you were ten and I nineteen." "And me up in a tree stealing the cherries, and that awful farmer trying to shake me down! Then you came to the rescue." "Can you trust me, Peggy?" "Why, of course! What's the matter?" He took a written paper and a pen which he laid on Margaret's knee. "Will the Queen trust Jimmy even to signing that?" "Colonel Anderson," she read, "Queen's Messenger, is to obey the bearer, Trooper the Marquess of Sydney." "Is it something very wicked?" she asked. "Awfully." So the Queen wrote in great haste: "Margaret. R.I." THE SECRET OF LYONESSE AN INTERLUDE This is the secret of Lyonesse, that the Divine methods of creation had been applied to the needs of man. Come just for a moment upon this path of thought, leaving the old earth, to tread a course of stars, to traverse the Milky Way. Come to the very end, to the edge of the Formless Void. And now look down into Space, into the outer darkness, into the Ether. The Almighty has put a stress upon it, and the Ether lives. Stressed in one way and we know it at once for Matter, a fine dust. Its desire for rest we know as Force, driving that dust in a whirlwind roaring through the dark. The dust is heated by its movement, and flames into light whirling through space. That whirling cloud of light is a new-born sun. So suns are born. The sun cloud throws off a lesser cloud, which gathers into a separate sphere. The little globe whirling about its parent will cool and become a planet, like the Earth. So worlds are born. There are many Forces, but one group, the ripples of the Ether, form an octave like that of music. First of the seven notes are the long, slow ripples which we feel as heat; second, are the Hertzian ripples used in the wireless telegraph; third, is a region of the unknown; fourth, is the octave of Light the rays of the spectrum; fifth, the Rontgen rays; sixth, the Gamma rays proceeding from radium; seventh, the ripples of the Etheric Force. It is upon the notes of this vast scale that the forces of creation play the music of the spheres. The dust vibrations are of many kinds. One we know as gold, another as hydrogen, a third as carbon; and when two kinds vibrate in perfect harmony, they mingle together just like notes of music. Thus oxygen and hydrogen vibrating in harmony are water. The first man who ever walked upon this path of thought was John Brand I. He measured and reproduced the vibrations of matter, the tremours of Force. For him, in very deed, the stars sang together. First of all mortals he heard the music of the spheres.