There is nothing to be gained by dwelling upon sadness; the details of Paul’s suffering may be left to the imagination. It was characteristic of him that he sought instinctively, and without cant, for the Reality that lay behind his pain; and Reality—though seas of grief may first be plunged through to find it—is always Joy. For love is joy, and joy is strength, and both are aspects of the great central Reality of the life of the soul. The child was so woven into the strands of his inmost being that her going seemed, as it were, to draw out with her these very strands—drew them out away from himself towards—towards what? He hardly knew how to name it. The word ‘God’ rarely passed his lips: towards ‘Reality,’ then; towards the deep things he had sought all his life. Part of himself, however, the child had taken away with her. He passed more and more away from the things of the world, though these had never yet held him with any security in their mesh. Nixie had gone ahead, that was all. Before long, as years measure time at least, he would follow her. She might even come back, ‘like the trees in the spring,’ to tell him of the way. His great longing, unexpressed, had always been to know something of the Beyond—to see into the heart of things; not by the uninspired methods of an unsavoury spiritualism, or the artificial forcing-house of an audacious Magic; but by some inner, as yet undetermined, way in his own heart. For he had always clung to the secret belief that there must be some interior way of finding ‘Reality,’ some process, simple, piercing, profound, that would have authority for himself, if not for all the world. In the heart of all true mystics some such Faith is ingrained. They are born with it. It is ineradicable—lived, but rarely spoken. And the root of this belief it was that Nixie had unknowingly watered and fed. Her going seemed suddenly to have coaxed it almost into flower. His need of the great, satisfying Companion that knows no shadow of turning was incalculably quickened thereby. Love and Nature were the veils that screened the Beyond so thinly that he could almost see through them; and to both these mysteries the child had led him better than she knew. The energy of his mystical yearnings suddenly increased a hundredfold. Whether these remain within to poison, or go out to bless, depends, of course, upon the nature of the heart that feels them. Paul, fortunately for himself, had found ways of expression; he was always provided now with the safety of an outlet. And, for the immediate moment, the path was clear enough, and very simple. He was to comfort the mother that mourned her; himself that mourned her; the puzzled little brother and sister, and even the army of more or less disconsolate four-footed friends that missed her presence vaguely, and haunted the door of her room with the strange instinct that there must still be caresses for them within, and that for the moment she was merely hiding.