But even then it all seemed too utterly strange and wonderful to be true; and a subtle confirmation of the child’s presence that followed immediately only added at first to his increasing amazement. For both Smoke and Mrs. Tompkyns, he became aware, had jumped up softly upon the foot of the bed, and were sitting there, purring loudly with pleasure, close beneath the fleck of light. And their action made him seek the further confirmation of his own senses. He leaned forwards, hesitating in his bewilderment between the desire to find the matches and the desire to touch the speaker with his hands.
But even in that darkness his intention was divined instantly. The light slid away like a wee torch carried on wings.
‘No, Uncle Paul,’ whispered the voice farther off, ‘not the matches. Light makes it more difficult for me.’ He sank back against the pillows, frightened at the reality of it all. The old familiar name, too, ‘Uncle Paul,’ was almost more than he could bear.
‘Nixie——!’ he stammered, and then found it impossible to finish the sentence.
Then she laughed. He heard her silvery laughter in the room, exactly as he had heard it a hundred times before, spontaneous, mischievous, and absolutely natural. She was amused at his perplexity, at his want of faith; at the absurd difficulty he found in believing. He lay quite still, breathing hard, wondering what would come next; still trying to persuade himself it was all a dream, yet growing gradually convinced in spite of himself that it was not.
‘And don’t come too near me,’ he heard her voice across the room. ‘Never try and touch me, I mean. Think of me at your centre. That’s the real way to get near.’
Very slowly then, after that, he began to accept the Supreme Aventure. He talked. He asked questions, though never the obvious and detailed sort of questions it might have been expected he would ask. For it was now borne in upon him, as she said, that only her real part had come back, and that only his real part, therefore, was in touch with her. It was, so to speak, a colloquy of souls in which physical and material things had no interest. His very first question brought the truth of this home to him with singular directness. He asked her what the tiny light was that he saw moving to and fro like a little torch.
‘But I didn’t know there was a light,’ she answered. ‘Where I am it is all light! I see you perfectly. Only—you look so young, Uncle Paul! Just like a boy! About my own age, I mean.’
And it is impossible to describe the delight, the mystical rapture that came to him as he heard her. The words, ‘Where I am it is all light,’ brought with them a sudden sense of reality that was too convincing for him to doubt any longer. From her simple description he recognised a place that he knew. But, at the same time, he understood that it was no place in the ordinary sense of the word, but rather a state and a condition. He himself in his deepest dreams had been there too. That light had sometimes in brief moments of aspiration shone for him. And the curious sense of immense distance that came so curiously with her tiny voice came because there was really no distance at all. She was no longer conditioned by space or time. Those were limitations of life in the body, temporary scales of measurement adopted by the soul when dealing with temporary things. Whereas Nixie was free.
A sense of happiness deep as the sea, of peace, bliss, and perfect rest that could never know hurry or alarm, surged through him in a tide. He thought, with a thrill of anticipation, of the time when his own eyes would be opened, and he should see as clearly as she did. But instantly the rebuke came.