"No. We won't read long."
He turned to the visitor. "Do you mind listening?"
Miss Darcy was glad to listen. Marget began to read. Her old teacher remembered that she had read well twenty years ago. She read better now. The book was Lafcadio Hearn's West Indies. "We travel so," said Linden. "We take a right journeyer and journey with him."
The fire flickered, then seemed to pass into actual fire of sun. They were in Martinique, under Pelée, in Saint Pierre, in Grand Anse. Again she was startled to feel how real it was. She touched, she knew, the people of Martinique.
Later, when the book had been closed, when they had said good night, one to the other, when she lay in bed in the dark quiet, she experienced strongly what a certain number of times in her life she had been able to experience faintly. She experienced coherence that was wider than old coherences. She interlocked with this place and her hosts. She held them, they held her. At the end of the week she must go afar. "But never any more so far that I lose the tune—never any more!" She went to sleep with a strange, fair feeling of sea about her. Not that the forest, the hills and mountains, were not there, but she felt the sea likewise. "Of course it is there, but I never thought to look at it or taste it! The sea and mountains and they and me, threaded together, talking together!" She slept.
III
As she dressed, the next morning, she heard Mimy singing, but no stir of her hosts. The sun was shining. In at window streamed life-giving air. Her mind was upon the evening before and its current of happenings. As she had gone to sleep with the sea, of which they had read, about her, so now the three songs to which they had listened returned to mind, returned almost to sense. That was one remarkable thing about this place—the great vividness and depth of perception.... She knew the difference between usual or even intent thinking and intuition. Her intuitions had not been vigorous—she had looked at them with a kind of gray wonder, as at pale children from afar. They came at long intervals, but were never forgotten. It now seemed that this was a good clime for them.