“That is very interesting,” she said presently, speaking slowly, as one tracking an idea. “Von Schäde must have known that Dick Carey knew better how to exercise those latent powers than he did. They were both seeking the same thing from different motives.” “Explain, please.” Ruth was silent again for a moment, still thinking hard. “It’s not easy, you know,” she said. “But this is the best I can do. They were both scientists of the invisible, just as you are a scientist of the visible, but Dick Carey was seeking union with God and von Schäde was seeking knowledge and power for himself. Therefore they studied the unseen sources of life and death by different methods, and Dick Carey had got farther than von Schäde and von Schäde knew it.” North shook his head. “Now you are wandering in the mist so far as I am concerned,” he said. Ruth sighed. “I explain badly, but then I am only struggling in the mist myself. I wish I had cared for these things when Raphael Goltz was alive! So many things he said which passed me by then come back to me now with a new meaning. But there is one thing just lately I have felt very strongly. When he was in the physical body Dick Carey was a far more wonderful man than any of you knew—except probably von Schäde. Yes, you loved him I know, the world is black without him, but you didn’t think he was anything extraordinary. You are a great man and he was nobody, in the eyes of the world. You don’t know even now how wonderful he was. And now he has escaped from this clogging mould, this blinding veil of physical matter, he is, I firmly believe, making this little corner of the earth, this little Sussex farm, what every home and village the town might be if we were in touch with the invisible secret source of all.” She stopped, for she felt that North was not following her any longer, was shrinking back again. “Oh!” she cried, “why won’t you believe it is worth your study at any rate?” North turned on her suddenly, harshly, almost brutally. “I can’t,” he said hoarsely. “Don’t you see it’s all shapeless, formless, to a mind like mine? I want to believe. God! it would give one an horizon beyond eternity; but you talk of what to me is foolishness.” He looked at her with an immeasurable dreariness of soul in his eyes, and very gently she put her worn brown hand in his and held it. “Listen,” she said, and her voice was deep with sudden music. “The children come now. You cannot keep them away. Something draws them to Thorpe. The wild creatures one can understand. It is sanctuary. But the children—it must mean something.” “You are here.”