‘We’re nearly there,’ Nixie cried encouragingly, as he made a false step and landed with a crash in the middle of some low laurel bushes. ‘But _do_ be more careful, Uncle, please,’ she added, helping him out again. ‘There’s the clock striking!’ Jonah called, a little in front of them. ‘We’re only just in time!’ Paul recovered himself and pulled up beside them under the shadows of the big twin cedars that stood like immense sentries at the end of the lawn. He came rolling in, swaying like a ship in a heavy sea. And, as he did so, the sound of a church bell striking the hour came to their ears through the terrific uproar of the elements, blown this way and that by the wind. It was midnight striking. At the same instant he heard a peculiar sharp sound like whistling—the noise wind makes tearing through a narrow opening. ‘The crack, the crack!’ cried his guides together. ‘That’s the air rushing. It’s coming. Look out!’ They seized him by the hands. ‘But I shall never get through,’ shouted Paul, thinking of his size for the first time. ‘Yes you will,’ Nixie screamed back at him above the roar. ‘Between the sixth and seventh strokes, remember.’ The fifth stroke had already sounded. The wind caught it and went shrieking into the sky. Six! boomed the distant bell through the night. They held his hands in a vice. There was a sound like an express train tearing through the air. A quick flash of brilliance followed, and a long slit seemed to open suddenly in the sky before them, and then flash past like lightning. Nixie tugged at one hand, and Jonah tugged at the other. Smoke scampered madly past his feet. A wild rush of wind swept him along, whistling in his ears; there was a breathless and giddy sensation of dropping through empty space that seemed as though it could never end—and then Paul suddenly found himself sitting on a grassy bank beside a river, Nixie and Jonah on either side of him, and Smoke washing his face in front of them as though nothing in the whole world had ever happened to disturb his equanimity. And a bright, soft light, like the light of the sun, shone warmly over everything. ‘Only just managed it,’ Nixie observed to Jonah. ‘He _is_ rather wide, isn’t he?’ ‘Everybody’s thin somewhere,’ was the reply. ‘And the crack is very stretchy’—she added,—‘luckily.’ Paul drew a long breath and stretched himself. ‘Well,’ he said, still a little breathless and dizzy, ‘such things were never done in my day.’ ‘But this isn’t your day any more,’ explained Nixie, her blue eyes popping with laughter and mischief, ‘it’s your night. And, anyhow, as I told you, there’s no time here at all. There’s no hurry now.’ CHAPTER XV The imagination is not a state; it is the human existence itself.—W. B.