‘_You!_’ She laughed in his face, so to speak. ‘You, of course. Part of you is in me, so I couldn’t go on without you. But when you are ready, and have done your work, we’ll go on together. Daddy is waiting, too. Oh, it’s simply splendid—a very-splendid-indeed aventure, you see!’ Again she laughed through that darkened room till it seemed filled with white light, and the light flooded his very soul as he heard her. ‘You _will_ wait, Nixie?’ he asked. ‘I _must_ wait. Both of us must wait. We are all together, you see.’ And, after another long pause, he asked another question: ‘This work, then, that keeps me here——?’ ‘Your London boys, of course. There’s no one in the whole world who can do it so well. You’ve been picked out for it; that’s what really brought you home from America!’ And she burst out into such a peal of laughter that Paul laughed with her. He simply couldn’t help himself. He felt like singing at the same time. It was all so happy and reasonable and perfect. ‘You’ve got the money and the time and the ’thusiasm,’ she went on; ‘and over here there are thousands and millions of children all watching you and clapping their hands and dancing for joy. I’ve told them all the Aventures you wrote, but they think this is the best of all—the London-Boys-Aventure!’ He felt his heart swell within him. It seemed that the child’s hair was again about his eyes, her slender arms clasping his neck, and her blue eyes peering into his as when she begged him of old in the nursery or schoolroom for an aventure, a story. ‘So you’ll never give it up, will you, Uncle Paul?’ she sang, in that tiny soft voice through the darkness. ‘Never,’ he said. ‘Promise?’ ‘Promise,’ he replied. The thought of those ‘thousands and millions’ of children watching his work from the other side of death was one that would come back to strengthen him in the future hours of discouragement that he was sure to know. And much more she told him besides. They talked, it seemed, for ever—yet said so little. Into mere moments—such was the swift and concentrated nature of their intimacy—they compressed hours of earthly conversation; for his thoughts were heard and answered as soon as born within him, and a whole train of ideas that the lips ordinarily stammer over in difficult detail crowded easily into a single expression—a thought, a desire, a question half uttered, and then a reply that comprehended all. There was no labour or weariness, no sense of effort. Moreover, when at length he heard her faint whisper, ‘Now I must go,’ it conveyed no sense of departure or loss. She did not leave him. It was more as though he closed a much-loved book and replaced it in his pocket. The pictures evoked do not leave the mind because the cover is closed; they remain, on the contrary, to be absorbed by the heart. Nixie’s silvery presence was _in him_; he would always feel her now, even when his thoughts seemed busy with outer activities.