I rose up and joined her.
“It is a marvel. I can scarcely believe my eyes. How do you do it?”
“My father taught me. They come. How can I tell?”
She turned away and left me. I thought long over this episode. I recalled words heard in the place of my studies—words I had dismissed without any care at the moment. “To those who see, nothing is alien. They move in the same vibration with all that has life, be it in bird or flower. And in the Uttermost also, for all things are One. For such there is no death.”
That was beyond me still, but I watched her with profound interest. She recalled also words I had half forgotten—
“There was nought above me and nought below,
My childhood had not learnt to know;
For what are the voices of birds,
Aye, and of beasts, but words, our words,—
Only so much more sweet.”
That might have been written of her. And more.
She had found one day in the woods a flower of a sort I had once seen in the warm damp forests below Darjiling—ivory white and shaped like a dove in flight. She wore it that evening on her bosom. A week later she wore what I took to be another.
“You have had luck,” I said; “I never heard of such a thing being seen so high up, and you have found it twice.”
“No, it is the same.”