In this way, most strangely, sweetly, naturally, even the trivial details of their daily life as they had always known it together, intermingled with the talk that was often very earnest, mystical, and pregnant with meanings. It was in every sense a continuation of their former relationship, touched on her side with a greater knowledge—almost as though she had suddenly developed to the point she might have reached in time upon the earth; on his side, with a delicate sense of accepting guidance from some one with greater privileges than himself, who had come back on purpose to help and inspire him. For more and more it seemed to partake of the nature of genuine inspiration. Speech came direct and swift as thought, without hesitation or stammering as in the flesh. She told him many things, often quaintly enough expressed, but that yet seemed to hold the kernel of deep truths. There had never been the least break in their companionship, it seemed. ‘I knew all this before,’ she said, after a singular exchange of questions and answers about the nature of communion with invisible sources of mood and feeling, ‘only I suppose my brain had not got big enough, or whatever it was, to tell it. Like your poets you used to tell me about who couldn’t find their rhymes, perhaps.’ And her laughter flowed about him in a rippling flood that instantly woke his own. They always laughed. They felt so happy. It was a communion between old souls that surely had bathed deeply in the experiences of life before they had become imprisoned in the particular bodies known as Paul Rivers and Margaret Christina Messenger. He became convinced, too, more and more that she really did not speak at all—that no actual sound set the waves of air in motion—but that she put her words into him in the form of thoughts, and that he it was, in order to grasp them clearly, who clothed them with the symbols of sound and language. It was essentially of the nature of inspiration. She _blew_ the ideas into his heart and mind. And many things that he asked her were undoubtedly little more than his own thoughts, half-formed and vague, lying in the depths of him. ‘Then, over there, where you now are, is it—more real? Are you, as it were, one stage nearer to the great Reality? What’s it like——?’ ‘It’s through the real “Crack,” I think,’ she answered. ‘Everything is here that I imagined—but _really_ imagined—on earth. And people who imagined nothing, or wanted only the world, find very little here.’ ‘Then is the change very great——?’ ‘It doesn’t seem to me like a change at all. I’ve been here before for visits. Now I’ve come to stay, that’s all!’ ‘You yourself have not changed?’ She roared with laughter, till he felt that his question was really absurd. ‘Of course not! How can I change? I’m always Nixie, wherever I am!’ ‘But you feel different——?’ he insisted. ‘I feel better,’ she answered, still laughing. ‘I feel awfully jolly.’