‘So the language of wind and trees and water you translate afterwards into stories, do you?’ he asked, taking up the conversation where they had left it. It was hardly a question; he was musing aloud as he gazed out into the mists that gathered with the dusk. ‘It’s all silent enough now, at any rate there’s not a breath of air moving. The trees are dreaming—dreaming perhaps of the Dance of the Winds, or of the love-making of the snow when their leaves are gone and the flakes settle softly on the bare twigs; or perhaps dreaming of the humming of the sap that brings their new clothes with such a rush of glory and wonder in the spring——’ Again the child looked up into his face with shining eyes. The magic of her little treasured beliefs had touched the depths of him, and she felt that they were in the same world together, without pretence and without the barriers of age. She was radiantly happy, and rather wonderful into the bargain, a fairy if ever there was one. ‘They’re just thinking,’ she said softly. ‘So trees think too?’ She nodded her head, leaning her chin on her hands as she gazed with him into the misty air. ‘I wonder what their thoughts are like,’ he said musingly, so that she could take it for a question or not as she chose. ‘Like ours—in a way,’ she answered, as though speaking of something she knew beyond all question, ‘only not so small, not so sharp. Our thoughts prick, I think, but theirs stroke, all running quite smoothly into each other. Very big and wonderful indeed thoughts—big as wind, I mean, and wonderful as sky or distance. And the streams—the streams have long, winding thoughts that run down their whole length under water——’ ‘And the trees, you were saying,’ he said, seeing that her thought was wandering. ‘Yes, the trees,’ she repeated, ‘oh! yes, the trees are different a little, I think. A wood, you see, may have one big huge thought all at once——’ ‘All at once!’ ‘I mean all at the same time, every tree thinking the same thought for miles. Because, if you lie in a wood, and don’t think yourself, but just wait and wait and wait, you gradgilly get its great thought and know what it’s thinking about exactly. You feel it all over instead of—of——’ ‘Instead of getting a single little sharp picture in your mind,’ Paul helped her, grasping the wonder of her mystical idea. ‘I think that’s what I mean,’ she went on. ‘And it’s exactly the same with everything else—the sea, and the fields, and the sky—oh! and everything in the whole world.’ She made a sweeping gesture with her arm to indicate the universe.