By this means he might at last turn his accumulated stores to some useful account. The great geysers of imagination that dry up too soon with the majority might keep bubbling for ever; and provided the pipes kept open for smaller visions, they might with time become channels for inspiration of a still higher order. His audience might grow too.
‘I’m getting on,’ he observed to Nixie a few days later; ‘getting on pretty well for an old man!’
‘I knew you would,’ she replied approvingly. ‘Only you wasted a lot of time over it. When you came you were so old that Toby thought you were going to die, you know.’
‘So bad as all that, was it?’
‘H’mmmmm,’ she nodded, her blue eyes faintly troubled; ‘quite!’
Paul took her on his knee and stared at her. The world of elemental wonder came quite close. There was something of magic about the atmosphere of this child’s presence that made it possible to believe anything and everything. She embodied exquisitely so many of his dreams—those dreams of God and Nature he had lived with all those lonely years in Canadian solitudes.
‘You know, I think,’ he said slowly as he watched with delight the look of tender affection upon her face, ‘that, without knowing it, you’re something of a little magician, Nixie. What do you think?’
But she only laughed and wriggled on his knee.
‘Am I really?’ she said presently. ‘Then what are you, I wonder?’
‘I used to be a Wood Cruiser,’ he replied gravely; ‘but what I am now it’s rather difficult to say. You ought to know,’ he added, ‘as you’re the magician who’s changing me.’