"See!" she said, "I am alive again. I am alive because Donal came back to me. He comes every night and when he comes he is not dead. Can you believe it?"
"When I look at you and remember, I can believe anything. I do not understand. I do not know where he comes from—or how, but I believe that in some way you see him."
She had always been a natural and simple girl and it struck him that her manner had never been a more natural one.
"I do not know where he comes from," the clearness of a bell in her voice. "He does not want me to ask him. He did not say so but I know. When he is with me we know things without speaking words. We only talk of happy things. I have not told him that—that I have been unhappy and that I thought that perhaps I was really dead. He made me understand about you—but he does not know anything—else. Yes—" eagerly, eagerly, "you are believing—you are!"
"Yes—I am believing."
"If everything were as it used to be—I should see him and talk to him in the day time. Now I see him and talk to him at night instead. You see, it is almost the same thing. But we are really happier. We are afraid of nothing and we only tell each other of happy things. We know how wonderful everything is and that it was meant to be like that. You don't know how beautiful it is when you only think and talk about joyful things! The other things fly away. Sometimes we go out onto the moor together and the darkness is not darkness—it is a soft lovely thing as beautiful as the light. We love it—and we can go as far as we like because we are never tired. Being tired is one of the things that has flown away and left us quite light. That is why I feel light in the day and I am never tired or afraid. I remember all the day."
As he listened, keeping his eyes on her serenely radiant face, he asked himself what he should have been thinking if he had been a psychopathic specialist studying her case. He at the same time realised that a psychopathic specialist's opinion of what he himself—Lord Coombe—thought would doubtless have been scientifically disconcerting. For what he found that he thought was that, through some mysteriously beneficent opening of portals kept closed through all the eons of time, she who was purest love's self had strangely passed to places where vision revealed things as they were created by that First Intention—of which people sometimes glibly talked in London drawing-rooms. He had not seen life so. He was not on her plane, but, as he heard her, he for the time believed in its existence and felt a remote nostalgia.
"Dowie is very brave and tries not to be frightened," she went on; "but she is really afraid that something may happen to my mind. She thinks it is only a queer dream which may turn out unhealthy. But it is not. It is Donal."
"Yes, it is Donal," he answered gravely. And he believed he was speaking a truth, though he was aware of no material process of reasoning by which such a conclusion could be reached. One had to overleap gaps—even abysses—where material reasoning came to a full stop. One could only argue that there might be yet unknown processes to be revealed. Mere earthly invention was revealing on this plane unknown processes year by year—why not on other planes?
"I wanted to tell you because I want you to know everything about me. It seems as if I belong to you, Lord Coombe," there was actual sweet pleading in her voice. "You watched and made my life for me. I should not have been this Robin if you had not watched. When Donal came back he found me in the house you had taken me to because I could be safe in it. Everything has come from you.... I am yours as well as Donal's."