He remembered passing through caverns of roaring darkness, only to be caught up by a tongue of searing flame and hurled into some obscure dimness where it seemed that all the thought, melody, all the remembered sensation of a lifetime writhed about him like vague forms, one interposed upon the other, in unpatterned confusion.
But now these entangled vagaries faded away and suddenly he found himself sitting on a green slope at the outer perimeter of a grove of graceful trees. A blue mist drifted lightly up the far rise to soften the horizon. Marc was no stranger to this place for he had visited it often. He felt no dismay at finding himself again in the valley of his own mind. Indeed, through the last few years, it had become as familiar to him as his own home or office. So had the redheaded minx who found her existence there.
Marc stirred and looked around. The landscape was uninhabited. No lovely, lightly clad figure appeared on the horizon, no lithe form emerged from the groves and ran toward him.
Marc frowned anew over the improbable fact of Toffee. Certainly she existed in his mind, a constant and consistent product of his imagination. That was perfectly easy to understand. The parts of it, though, that he never quite got used to were her periods of existence outside his mind, in the world of actuality.
What Marc had never been able to really comprehend was that his mind could project into the physical world a physical being—to such an extent that her existence was not only apparent to himself but also to everyone else who came within the radius of the mental vibration which produced the girl.
The question in Marc's mind, then, was whether Toffee really existed, was truly real, or whether she was merely an hallucination, a sort of contagious hysteria.
Toffee's personality always got in the way of the answer. The girl was infinitely distracting, from the pert aliveness of her quick green eyes to the full redness of her lips. Beyond that there was the almost shameful perfection of her supple young body. These things blocked analytical thought. Then, too, there was her unerring instinct for roaring, bounding madness, and her absolute contempt for the logical, the moral or the conservative. Toffee, in brief, was at once brash, embarrassing, impetuous, warm, high-handed, endearing, maddening and completely unforgettable. So to all practical purposes, then, she was real; the matter of Toffee's source was pallidly unimportant next to the vivid fact of Toffee herself.
Marc stretched luxuriously and got to his feet, but as he did so he peered around toward the green obscurity of the forest. There was still no movement, no sound. He frowned quizzically. This wasn't at all usual. Always before Toffee had been there to greet him almost at the instant of his arrival. Another time she would be swarming all over him by now.
He shrugged and started aimlessly up the rise. At first he climbed unhurriedly, but as he drew nearer the trees his gait quickened. At the outskirts of the forest he found himself pausing to listen, but there was no sound. The feathery branches swayed in silent grace before him. A small concern began to trickle into his mind.