A sound of rising wind, distant yet ominous, went past the window, as for a moment then the girl came closer till she was almost in his arms, and though he did not accept her, equally he did not shrink from the idea of acceptance—for the first time since they had known one another. There was a smell of flowers; almost in that wailing wind he was aware of music.
"Together," he heard her whisper, while a faint shiver—was it of joy or terror?—ran through her nerves. "All of us—when the time comes—together." She made an abrupt movement. "Just as we are together now! Listen!" she exclaimed.
"We call it wind," she whispered. "But of course—really—it's behind—beyond—inside—isn't it?"
Dr. Fillery, holding her closely, made no answer. Then he laughed, let go her hands, and said in his natural tone again, breaking an undesirable spell intentionally, though with a strong effort: "We are in space and time, remember. Iraida. Let us obey them happily until another certain and practical thing is shown us."
The faint sound that had been rising about them in the air died down again.
They looked into each other's eyes, then drew apart, though with a movement so slight it was scarcely perceptible. It was Nayan and Dr. Fillery once more, but not before the former had apparently picked out the very thought that had lain, though unexpressed, in the latter's deepest mind—its sudden rising the cause of his deliberate change of attitude. For she had phrased it, given expression to it, though from an angle very different to his own. And her own word, "escape," used earlier in the conversation, had deliberately linked on with it, as of intentional purpose.
"He must go back. The time is coming when he must go back. We are not ready for him here—not yet."
Somewhat in this fashion, though without any actual words, had the idea appeared in letters of fire that leaped and flickered through a mist of anguish, of loss, of loneliness, rising out of the depths within him. He knew whence they came, he divined their origin at once, and the sound, though faint and distant at first, confirmed him. Swiftly behind them, moreover, born of no discoverable antecedents, it seemed, rose simultaneously the phrase that Father Collins loved: "A Being in his own place is the ruler of his fate." Father Collins, for all his faults and strangeness, was a personality, a consciousness, that might prove of value. His extraordinarily swift receptiveness, his undoubted telepathic powers, his fluid, sensitive, protean comprehension of possibilities outside the human walls, above the earthly ceiling, so to speak.... Value suddenly attached itself to Father Collins, as though the name had been dropped purposely into his mind by someone. He was surprised to find this thought in him. It was not for the first time, however, Dr. Fillery remembered.
In Nayan's father, again, an artist, though not a particularly subtle one perhaps, lay a deep admiration, almost a love, he could not explain. "There's something about him in a sense immeasurable, something not only untamed but untamable," he phrased it. "His gentleness conceals it as a summer's day conceals a thunderstorm. To me it's almost like an incarnation of the primal forces at work in the hearts of my own people"—he grew sad—"and as dangerous probably." He was speaking to his daughter, who repeated the words later to Dr. Fillery. The study of Fire in the elemental group had failed. "He's too big, too vast, too formless, to get into any shape or outline my tools can manage, even by suggestion. He dominates the others—Earth, Air, Water—and dwarfs them."