"Joy!" he said, reading her thought and feeling. "Joy!"
"Joy! Another place!" she heard herself repeating, her eyes now fixed upon his own.
She felt lighter, caught up and away a little, lifted above the solid earth; as if it was heat that lightened, and wind that bore her upwards. Everything in her became intensified.
"Another state, another place"—her voice seemed to borrow something of the rhythm in his own, though she did not notice it—"but not away from earth, this beautiful earth?" With a happy smile she added, "I love the dear kind earth, I love it."
The light on his face increased:
"The earth we love and serve," he said, "is beautiful, but here"—he looked about him round the room, at the trees waving through the window, at the misty sky above draping the pale light of the sun—"here I am on the surface only. There is confusion and struggle. Everything quarrels against everything else. It is discord and disorder. There is no harmony. Here, on the surface, everything is separate. There is no working together. It is all pain, each little part fighting for itself. Here—I am outside—there is no joy."
It was the phrase "I am outside" that flashed something more of his meaning into her. His full meaning lay beyond actual words perhaps; but this phrase fell like a shock into that inmost self which she had deliberately put away.
"You are from inside, yes," she exclaimed, marvelling afterwards that she had said it; "within—nearer to the centre——!"
And he took the abrupt interruption as though they both understood and spoke of the same one thing together, having found a language born of similar great yearnings and of forgotten knowledge, times, states, conditions, places.
"I come," he said, his voice, his bright smile alive with the pressure of untold desire, "from another place that is—yes—inside, nearer to the centre. I have forgotten almost everything. I remember only that there was harmony, love, work and happiness all combined in the perfect liberty of our great service. We served the earth. We helped the life upon it. There was no end, no broken fragments, no failure." The voice touched chanting. "There was no death."