She stopped, and in both their minds was a vision of Violet Riversley’s beautiful angry unhappy face.
“I remember,” answered North. “And your idea is that Dick’s mind can communicate with yours by thought?”
Ruth thought a little; her eyes looked out without seeing.
“It is not an idea,” she said at last. “I know.”
“And have you any idea or knowledge why it should be so, seeing you never knew each other in this life? If you had, and had loved very deeply, it would be more comprehensible, though less interesting from the point of view of proving communication. As it is, there seems to me nothing sufficiently important to account for it. Nothing beyond a certain likeness of thought and interests.”
Ruth smiled. The interest had gripped him again. He was thinking out aloud. She waited until he looked at her.
“What is your explanation?” he asked.
And suddenly Ruth found it amazingly difficult to explain. The memory of that velvet night of stars, the message in the song of the little brown bird, the revelation which had come to her, swept over her again with a renewed and surprising sweetness, but of words she seemed bereft. Compared with the wonder and beauty of the thought they seemed utterly inadequate and hopeless. She put out both her hands with a little foreign gesture of helplessness.
“You have none?” he asked, and she caught the disappointment in his voice, and looking at him saw, as she had seen once before on his first visit, the lonely tired soul of the man who, losing Dick Carey, had lost much. And Dick Carey was there, so very surely there.
“It isn’t the personal love for one that really brings together,” she said, her voice very, very gentle. “It is the love for everything that has life or breath. That love must be communion. It makes you belong.”