"But that is all forgiven now," she replied calmly in her firm, gentle voice. "We need not speak of it. You understand now"—she ended lamely—"that it is not possible——"
He listened intently, gravely, as though with a certain effort, his head bent forward to catch every syllable. And as he bent, peering, listening, he might have been some other-worldly being staring down through a window in the sky into the small confusions of earth's affairs.
"Yes," he said, the moment she stopped speaking, "I understand now. I shall never make you suffer again. Only—I could not know that you had forgotten—so completely."
"Forgotten?" she again repeated in spite of herself, for the way he uttered the word again stirred that nameless, deep emotion in her. Their attitudes respectively were changing. She no longer felt that she could "mother" this great figure before her.
"Where we belong," he answered in his great quiet voice. "There," he added, in a way that made it the counterpart of her own spontaneous and intuitive "here." "It is so easy. I had forgotten too. But Fillery, dear Fillery, helps me to remember, and the stars and flowers and wind, these help me too. And then you—when I saw you I suddenly remembered more. I was so happy. I remembered what I had left to come among men and women. I knew that Fillery and you belonged 'there' with me. You, both, had come down for a little time, come down 'here,' but had remained too long. You had become almost as men and women are. I remembered everything when I saw your eyes. I was so happy in a moment, as I looked at you, that I felt I must go back, go home. The central fire called me, called us all three. I wanted to escape and take you with me. I knew by your eyes that you were ready. You called to Fillery. We were off."
He paused a moment, while she listened in breathless silence.
"Then, suddenly, you refused. You resisted. Something prevented. The Messengers were there when suddenly"—an expression of yearning pain clouded his great eyes a moment—"you forgot again. I forgot too, forgot everything. The darkness came. It was cold. My enemy, the water, caught me."
He stopped, and passed his hands across his forehead, sighing, his eyes fixed upon vacancy as with an intense effort to recover something. "And I still forget," he went on, the yearning now transferred from the eyes to the lowered voice. "I can remember nothing again. All, all is gone from me." The light in his face actually grew dimmer as he slowly uttered the words. He leaned back in his big arm-chair. Again, it occurred to her, it was as if he drew back from that window in the sky.
A curious hollow, empty of life, seemed to drop into the room between them as his voice ceased.
While he had been speaking, the girl watched and listened with intense interest and curiosity. She remembered he was a "patient," yet no touch of uneasiness or nervousness was in her. His strange words, meaningless as they might seem, woke deep echoes of some dim buried recognition in her. It amazed and troubled her. This young man, this sinner against the conventions whom she had come to comfort and forgive, held the reins already. What had happened, what was happening, and how did he contrive it? She was aware of a clear, divining knowledge in him, a power, a directness she could not fathom. He seemed to read her inside out. It was more than uncanny; it was spiritual. It mastered her.