Paul, looking round, felt utterly at peace with himself and the world; at rest, he felt. That was his first sensation in the mass. He recovered in a moment from his breathless entrance, and a subtle pleasure began to steal through his veins. It seemed as if every yearning he had ever known was being ministered to by competent unseen Presences; and, obviously, the children and the cats—Mrs. Tompkyns had somehow managed to join Smoke—felt likewise, for their countenances beamed and blinked supreme contentment. ‘Ah!’ observed Jonah, sitting contentedly on the grass beside him. ‘This is the place.’ He heaved a happy little sigh, as though the statement were incontrovertible. ‘It is,’ echoed Paul. And Nixie’s eyes shone like blue flowers in a field of spring. ‘The crack’s smaller than it used to be though,’ he heard her murmuring to herself. ‘Every year it’s harder to get through. I suppose something’s happening to the world—or to people; some change going on——’ ‘Or we’re getting older,’ Jonah put in with profounder wisdom than he knew. Paul congratulated himself upon his successful entrance. He felt something of a dog! The bank on which he lay sloped down towards a river fledged with reeds and flowers; its waters, blue as the sky, flowed rippling by, and a soft wind, warm and scented, sighed over it from the heart of the summer. On the opposite shore, not fifty yards across, a grove of larches swayed their slender branches lazily in the sun, and a little farther down the banks he saw a line of willows drooping down to moisten their tongue-like leaves. The air hummed pleasantly with insects; birds flashed to and fro, singing as they flew; and, in the distance, across miles of blue meadowlands, hills rose in shadowy outline to the sky. He feasted on the beauty of it all, absorbing it through every sense. ‘But where are we?’ he asked at length, ‘because a moment ago we were in a storm somewhere?’ He turned to Nixie who still lay talking to herself contentedly at his side. ‘And what really happens here?’ he added with a blush. ‘I feel so extraordinarily happy.’ They lay half-buried among the sweet-scented grasses. Jonah burrowed along the shore at some game of his own close by, and the cats made a busy pretence of hunting wild game in a dozen places at once, and then suddenly basking in the sun and washing each other’s necks and backs as though wild-game hunting were a bore. ‘Nothing ’xactly—_happens_,’ she answered, and her voice sounded curiously like wind in rushes—‘but everything—_is_.’ It seemed to him as though he listened to some spirit of the ages, very wise with the wisdom of eternal youth, that spoke to him through the pretty little mouth of this rosy-faced child. ‘It’s like that river,’ she went on, pointing to the blue streak winding far away in a ribbon through the landscape, ‘which flows on for ever in a circle, and never comes to an end. Everything here goes on always, and then always begins again.’