There came upon me with that meeting a great surging knowledge of my love for Bee. My love, born up there in my own world. And then, in the realm of the Egos, stripped of the physical, a changed love which had faded to a vague affection—a knowledge that she was dear to me, but nothing more.
Now—in the Borderland once more, at least of half-material substance, a very human love descended in a torrent. My arms went around her.
"Bee, my darling." And she responded to my caresses, kissing me with an eagerness, a longing undisguised. "Rob! I've been so frightened, not having you—" Murmured then that she loved me; and clung to me.... The threshold of our own world.
But it was no time for love-making. I told Thone and Will what was transpiring, what already had come to pass, down there in New York. And with them we presently swept forward to the rescue.
Thone's army was at least as large as Brutar's; and it was not, like his, burdened by those who could not fight. In orderly array it advanced, and soon ahead of us we saw the shapes of Brutar's forces.
Strange ghostly battle into which now we plunged! I did not, could not fully understand it at the time—but now I think I do. The very essence of it a physical inactivity. Fighting! The word to our Earthly minds is so full of movement! Yet a man battling with himself, pitting the good against the evil within himself, may sit in his easy chair and fight a fierce fight.
So it was here; unleashed forces of the mind, grappling silently—a struggle without rules of combat in which no quarter could be given, and which could only end by complete annihilation of one side or the other. I knew all this, and standing with Bee, Thone and Will on a dark eminence above the scene, I watched, breathlessly.
We were under that same little Westchester town. Its streets and houses lay shadowy above us. Ghostly people were up there—thronging the streets—gazing down with fear and awe at these flowing masses of ghosts advancing to battle.
The mob of Brutar's followers, frightened now, were huddled compactly. In area, they spread under perhaps half the village. And around them in a great concentric ring, Brutar's fighters massed. This movement Thone did not disturb.