For the river, as Paul afterwards found out, ran on for miles and miles, in the curves of an immense circle, of which the sea itself was apparently nothing but a widening of certain portions. ‘So here,’ continued the child, making a pattern with daisies on his sleeve as she talked, ‘you can go over anything you like again and again, and it need never come to an end at all. Only,’ she added, looking up gravely into his face, ‘you must really, _really_ want it to start with.’ ‘Without getting tired?’ he asked, wonderingly. ‘Of course; because _you_ begin over and over again with it.’ ‘Delightful!’ he exclaimed, ‘that means a place of eternal youth, where emotions continually renew themselves.’ ‘It’s the place where you find lost things,’ she explained, with a little puzzled laugh at his foolish long words, ‘and where things that came to no proper sort of end—things that didn’t come true, I mean, in the world, all happen and enjoy themselves——’ He sat up with a jerk, forgetting the carefully arranged daisies on his coat, and scattering them all over the grass. ‘But this is too splendid!’ he cried. ‘This is what I’ve always been looking for. It’s what I was thinking about just now when I tried to write a poem and couldn’t.’ ‘_We_ found it long ago,’ said the child, pointing to Jonah and Mrs. Tompkyns, Smoke having mysteriously disappeared for the moment. ‘We live here really most of the time. Daddy brought us here first.’ ‘Things life promised, but never gave, here come to full fruition,’ Paul murmured to himself. ‘You mean,’ he added aloud, ‘this is where ideals that have gone astray among the years may be found again, and actually realised? A kingdom of heaven within the heart?’ He was very excited, and forgot for the moment he was speaking to a child. ‘I don’t know about all that,’ she answered, with a puzzled look. ‘But it is life. We live-happily-ever-after here. That’s what I mean.’ ‘It all comes true here?’ ‘All, all, all. All broken things and all lost things come here and are happy again,’ she went on eagerly; ‘and if you look hard enough you can find ’xactly what you want and ’xactly what you lost. And once you’ve found it, nothing can break it or lose it again.’ Paul stared, understanding that the voice speaking through her was greater than she knew. ‘And some things are lost, _we_ think,’ she added, ‘simply because they were wanted—wanted very much indeed, but never got.’ ‘Yet these are certainly the words of a child,’ he reflected, wonder and delight equally mingled, ‘and of a child tumbling about among great spiritual things in a simple, intuitive fashion without knowing it.’ ‘All the things that ought to happen, but never do happen,’ she went on, picking up the scattered daisies and making the pattern anew on a different part of his coat. ‘They all are found here.’ ‘Wishes, dreams, ideals?’ he asked, more to see what answer she would make than because he didn’t understand.