‘Face to face at last!’ he heard himself cry. ‘Bless your little fairy heart! Why in the world didn’t I guess you sooner?’ A flame of happiness sped through him, and grief ran away utterly. The sense of loss that had numbed his soul vanished. And when she only answered him by the old mischievous laughter, he asked again: ‘But how did you disguise yourself so well—your voice, and everything——? Even if your face _was_ veiled I ought to have recognised you! It’s too wonderful!’ ‘It was you who disguised me!’ she replied, standing up close in front of him, and playing with his waistcoat buttons as of old. ‘Your thoughts about me got twisted—sometimes. You thought too much. You should have _felt_ only.’ ‘They never shall again,’ he exclaimed. ‘They never can. We are face to face now.’ Paul turned to look again more closely. He saw her with extraordinary detail and vividness. It was indeed Nixie, but Nixie exactly as he had always wanted her, without quite knowing it himself; at least, without acknowledging it. No gulf of age was there to separate them now. She was the perfect Companion, for he had made her so. He smoothed her hair as they turned to walk by the river, and he caught the old childish perfume of it as it spread untidily over his shoulder, her eyes like dropped stars shining through it. ‘Isn’t it awfully jolly?’ she whispered: ‘we can have twice as many aventures now, and you can go on writing them for Jonah and Toby just the same as before, only faster.’ He felt her hand steal into his; his heart became most strangely merged with hers. He had known a similar experience in Canadian forests, when the beauty of Nature had sometimes caught him up till he scarcely felt himself distinct enough from it to realise that he was separate. He now knew himself as close to her as that. It was exquisite and yet so simple that a little child might have felt it—without perplexity. Perhaps it was precisely what children always _did_ feel towards what they loved, animate or inanimate. ‘But how is it you can come so close?’ he asked, though he fancied that he thought, rather than spoke, the question. ‘Because, in the important sense, you are still a child,’ he caught the answer, ‘and always have been, and always will be.’ The whole world belonged to him. In the midst of the sea of sorrow he had discovered the little island of happiness. ‘We never can lose each other—_now_!’ he said. ‘As long as you think about me,’ she answered. ‘Please always think hard, veryhardindeed thoughts. Through the Crack you can find everything that’s lost——.’ ‘And we’re through the Crack now.’ ‘Rather!’ * * * * * CHAPTER XXVII