at this feeling I turned away. “What?” said Aurelius, without even looking round, but apparently aware of my feeling. Seated in his lap, he took hardly more notice of me, but I was comforted. His silence was not a mere absence of words. It was not the peevish silence of one too cautious or too fearful to speak; nor the silence of one who has suddenly become isolated and feels it, yet cannot escape. Up out of the silence rose the voice of Aurelius reading out of the book before him. Over my shoulder came the rustling of ivy, and the sighing of trees, and the running of the brook through the coomb; the moon, close at hand, out in the black garden, pressed her face against the window and looked in at me. Aurelius was reading of that great king who had under him a hundred thousand kings, and whose chief delight was in ancient books telling of the loveliness of Paradise: “And when he met with this description of the world to come, and of Paradise and its pavilions, its lofty chambers, its trees and fruits, and of the other things in Paradise, his heart enticed him to construct its like on earth....” The world extended to a vastness that came close up to me and enfolded me as a lake enfolds one swan. Thus at the building of that Paradise I easily imagined doorways that would have admitted Orion and the Pleiades together. And at last, at the cry of destruction, though I was sorry, I was intensely satisfied with both the sadness and the splendour. I began to dream in the following silence. I dreamed I was lying at the edge of an immense sea, upon a rock scarcely raised above the water of the colour of sapphires. I saw go by me a procession of enormous seals whose backs swelled out of the wavelets like camels, and as they passed in deep water, a few yards away, each one cast on me his dark soft eyes, and they were the eyes of Aurelius. There were more coming behind when I awoke. Aurelius lighted another lamp. I went over again to the window and looked out. In a flash I saw the outer vast world of solitude, darkness, and silence, waiting eternally for its prey, and felt behind me the little world within that darkness like a lighthouse. I went back to the others. Aurelius for all I knew went to the kingdoms of the moon. Many times again he read to us after I had on some pretext brought him to Abercorran House, a year or two later.