It was curious. Afterwards he could never remember the way she ended the sentence. For the life of him he could not write it down. Definite recollection failed him, together with the loss of the actual words. Only the general sense remained in such a way as to open to his inner eye a huge vista of spiritual endeavour and advance that left him breathless and dizzy when he contemplated it, but at the same time charged most splendidly with courage and with hope. ‘Then the pains of limitation,’ he remembered asking, ‘the anguish of impossible yearnings that vainly seek expression—these are symptoms of growth that in the end may produce something higher and nobler?’ ‘Must!’ he heard the answer amid a burst of happy laughter, as though from where she stood it were possible to look back upon earthly pangs and see them in the terms of joy; ‘just like any other suffering! Like the stress of heat and pressure that turns common clay into gems——’ He interrupted her swiftly, high hopes crowding through his spirit like the rush of an army. ‘Then the life in us all—the “Bits of Reality” in you and me—have passed through all possible forms in their huge upward journey to reach our present stage——?’ He stammered amid a multitude of golden memories, half captured. ‘Of course, Uncle Paul, of course!’ he caught deep, deep within him the silvery faint reply. ‘And your love and sympathy with trees, winds, hills, with all Nature, even with animals’—again her laughter ran out to him like a song—‘is because you passed long ago through them all, and _half remember_. You still _feel with_ them, and your imagination for ever strives to reconstruct the various beauty known in each stage. You remember in the depths of you the longings of every particular degree—even of the time when your soul was less advanced, and groping upwards as your London waifs grope even now. This is why your sympathy with them, too, is deep and true. You _half remember_.’ ‘And Death,’ he whispered, trembling with the joy of infinite spiritual desire. The answer sank down into him with the Little Wind that stirred the cedars overhead, or else rose singing up from the uttermost depths of his listening heart—to the end of his days he never could tell which. ‘What you call Death is only slipping through the Crack to a great deal more memory, and a great deal more power of seeing and telling—towards the greatest Expression that ever can be known. It is, I promise you faithfully, Uncle Paul, nothing but a very-wonderfulindeed Aventure, after all!’ _Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES 1. Silently corrected obvious typographical errors and variations in spelling. 2. Retained archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed. 3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.