content came to her and she—awoke. More than ever it seemed as if that other were the real life, and this a heavy dream.
V
The twilight glow still lingered in the west and the evening breeze called her to thoughts of home.
But she had learned wisdom, and when they asked her where she had been, Eline said she had fallen asleep in the sunshine on a rock by the great river. Which was true.
Of her dream she said nothing to any except to the old man who alone seemed to understand her a little. He did not laugh, but looked with thoughtful eyes intent, into the distance, away to the starlit sky, and it seemed to her that he also was trying to remember a forgotten dream of life. And seeing this she put her hand in his trustingly, and they two knew well each other’s thoughts though never a word was spoken.
It seemed to the old man that the child was leading him along a familiar road to a home forgotten—after many weary days of wandering.
“There are some things the heart can say that words can never tell,” he said to himself when she was gone. “I think we understand one another.”
As time passed by Eline came to know more and more of that other life and she longed to tell these things to the people who struggled and surged in hot strife to win the things of the world they knew, never thinking that there was a happier, purer, brighter world. Some thought they knew of such a one; but all except a few made it seem like the one in which they lived—only they made it a little more bright by day, a little more dark by night, and with a little more success in the strife for the things that change and pass away. These she would tell of the nobler life she knew, but they listened not at all.
In due time Eline was sent to school to learn. But her teachers found little that she did not quickly understand. For one thing she remembered now plainly, how in the garden of delight everything that was done was well done—were it the telling of a story or the singing of a song or the watering of the flowers that grew in that fair land. All was done with a wonderful thoroughness, and Eline now felt that she must do all things in that way or leave them quite alone. But often they would teach Eline things about which she seemed to care little and to understand as one in a dream. Then they would call her attention to the work only to find that she was learning to understand a great deal more than they themselves could tell. It was so with numbers. When they asked her what the numbers were by name, she not only named them all but told them why they were so named and what each meant. And so with music. With every chord she seemed to see harmonies of color, like beautiful pictures too glorious to paint. And when she said that life itself to her was music, Eline’s teachers did not understand.