“Ah! I see better now,” she murmured. “I am sinking ... sinking ...”
He waited for several minutes and then resumed the questioning.
“Now tell me who you are,” he enjoined.
She faintly shook her head. Her lips trembled, as though she tried to utter several names and then abandoned all. The effort seemed beyond her. The perplexed expression on the face with the shut eyes was movingly pathetic, so that I longed to help her, though I knew not how.
“Thank you,” she murmured instantly, with a gentle smile in my direction. Our thoughts, then, already found each other!
“Tell me who you are,” Julius repeated firmly. “It is not the name I ask.”
She answered distinctly, with a smile:
“A mother. I am soon to be a mother and give birth.”
He glanced at me significantly. There was both joy and sadness in his eyes. But it was not this disclosure that he sought. She was still entangled in the personality of To-day. It was far older layers of memory and experience that he wished to read. “Once she gets free from this,” he whispered, “it will go with leaps and bounds, whole centuries at a time.” And again I knew by the smile hovering round the lips that she had heard and understood.
“Pass deeper; pass beyond,” he continued, with more authority in the tone. “Drive through—sink down into what lies so far behind.”