“We shall meet,” I said confidently. She smiled and was silent.
“Do we follow a will-o’-the wisp in parting? Do we give up the substance for the shadow? Shall I stay?”
She laughed joyously;
“We give a single rose for a rose-tree that bears seven times seven. Daily I see more, and you are going where you will be instructed. As you know my mother prefers for a time to have my cousin with her to help her with the book she means to write. So I shall have time to myself. What do you think I shall do?”
“Blow away on a great wind. Ride on the crests of tossing waves. Catch a star to light the fireflies!”
She laughed like a bird’s song.
“Wrong—wrong! I shall be a student. All I know as yet has come to me by intuition, but there is Law as well as Love and I will learn. I have drifted like a happy cloud before the wind. Now I will learn to be the wind that blows the clouds.”
I looked at her in astonishment. If a flower had desired the same thing it could scarcely have seemed more incredible, for I had thought her whole life and nature instinctive not intellective. She smiled as one who has a beloved secret to keep.
“When you have gained what in this country they call The Knowledge of Regeneration, come back and ask me what I have learnt.”
She would say no more of that and turned to another matter, speaking with earnestness;