‘Of course; because you begin over and over again with it.’
‘Delightful!’ he exclaimed, ‘that means a place of eternal youth, where emotions continually renew themselves.’
‘It’s the place where you find lost things,’ she explained, with a little puzzled laugh at his foolish long words, ‘and where things that came to no proper sort of end—things that didn’t come true, I mean, in the world, all happen and enjoy themselves——’
He sat up with a jerk, forgetting the carefully arranged daisies on his coat, and scattering them all over the grass.
‘But this is too splendid!’ he cried. ‘This is what I’ve always been looking for. It’s what I was thinking about just now when I tried to write a poem and couldn’t.’
‘We found it long ago,’ said the child, pointing to Jonah and Mrs. Tompkyns, Smoke having mysteriously disappeared for the moment. ‘We live here really most of the time. Daddy brought us here first.’
‘Things life promised, but never gave, here come to full fruition,’ Paul murmured to himself. ‘You mean,’ he added aloud, ‘this is where ideals that have gone astray among the years may be found again, and actually realised? A kingdom of heaven within the heart?’ He was very excited, and forgot for the moment he was speaking to a child.
‘I don’t know about all that,’ she answered, with a puzzled look. ‘But it is life. We live-happily-ever-after here. That’s what I mean.’
‘It all comes true here?’
‘All, all, all. All broken things and all lost things come here and are happy again,’ she went on eagerly; ‘and if you look hard enough you can find ’xactly what you want and ’xactly what you lost. And once you’ve found it, nothing can break it or lose it again.’