Henry. Your mind, I feel, has brought this cargo of new suggestion and discharged it into me--into every one--into the whole blessed village. Man, I think you've bewitched us all!'

Mother dropped a stitch, so keenly was she listening. A moment later she dropped a needle too, and the two men picked it up, and handed it back together as though it weighed several pounds.

'Well,' said Rogers slowly, 'I suppose all minds pour into one another somewhere--in and out of one another, rather--and that there's a common stock or pool all draw upon according to their needs and power to assimilate. But I'm not conscious, old man, of driving anything deliberately into you--'

'Only you think and feel these things vividly enough for me to get them too,' said Daddy. Luckily 'thought transference' was not actually mentioned, or Mother might have left the room, or at least have betrayed an uneasiness that must have chilled them.

'As a boy I imagined pretty strongly,' in a tone of apology, 'but never since. I was in the City, remember, twenty years--'

'It's the childhood things, then,' Daddy interrupted eagerly. 'You've brought the great childhood imagination with you--the sort of gorgeous, huge, and endless power that goes on fashioning of its own accord just as dreams do--'

'I _did,_ indulge in that sort of thing as a boy, yes,' was the half- guilty reply; 'but that was years and years ago, wasn't it?'

'They have survived, then,' said Daddy with decision. 'The sweetness of this place has stimulated them afresh. The children'--he glanced suspiciously at his wife for a moment--'have appropriated them too. It's a powerful combination. After a pause he added, 'I might develop that idea in my story--that you've brought back the sweet creations of childhood with you and captured us all--a sort of starry army.'

'Why not?' interpolated Mother, as who should say there was no harm in _that_. 'They certainly have been full of mischief lately.'

'Creation _is_ mischievous,' murmured her husband. 'But since you have come,' he continued aloud,--'how can I express it exactly?--the days have seemed larger, fuller, deeper, the forest richer and more mysterious, the sky much closer, and the stars more soft and intimate. I dream of them, and they all bring me messages that help my story. Do you know what I mean? There were days formerly, when life seemed empty, thin, peaked, impoverished, its scale of values horribly reduced, whereas now--since you've been up to your nonsense with the children--some tide stands at the full, and things are always happening.'

'Well, really, Daddy!' said the expression on Mother's face and hands and knitting-needles, 'you _are_ splendid to-day'; but aloud she only repeated her little hold-all phrase, 'Why not?'

Yet somehow he recognised that she understood him better than usual. Her language had not changed--things in Mother worked slowly, from within outwards as became her solid personality--but it held new meaning. He felt for the first time that he could make her understand, and more--that she was ready to understand. That is, he felt new sympathy with her. It was very delightful, stimulating; he instantly loved her more, and felt himself increased at the same time.

'I believe a story like that might even sell,' he observed, with a hint of reckless optimism. 'People might recognise a touch of their own childhood in it, eh?'

He longed for her to encourage him and pat him on the back.

'True,' said Mother, smiling at him, 'for every one likes to keep in touch with their childhood--if they can. It makes one feel young and hopeful--jolly; doesn't it? Why not?'

Their eyes met. Something, long put aside and buried under a burden of exaggerated care, flashed deliciously between them. Rogers caught it flying and felt happy. Bridges were being repaired, if not newly built.

'Nature, you see, is always young really,' he said; 'it's full of children. The very meaning of the word, eh, John?' turning to his cousin as who should say, 'We knew our grammar once.'

'_Natura_, yes--something about to produce.' They laughed in their superior knowledge of a Latin word, but Mother, stirred deeply though she hardly knew why, was not to be left out. Would the bridge bear her, was perhaps her thought.

'And of the feminine gender,' she added slyly, with a touch of pride. The bridge creaked, but did not give way. She said it very quickly. She had suddenly an air of bouncing on her sofa.

'Bravo, Mother,' said her husband, looking at her, and there was a fondness in his voice that warmed and blessed and melted down into her. She had missed it so long that it almost startled her. 'There's the eternal old magic, Mother; you're right. And if I had more of you in me--more of the creative feminine--I should do better work, I'm sure. You must give it to me.'

She kept her eyes upon her needles. The others, being unobservant 'mere men,' did not notice that the stitches she made must have produced queer kind of stockings if continued. 'We'll be collaborators,' Daddy added, in the tone of a boy building on the sands at Margate.

'I will,' she said in a low voice, 'if only I know how.'

'Well,' he answered enthusiastically, looking from one to the other, delighted to find an audience to whom he could talk of his new dream, 'you see, this is really a great jolly fairy-tale I'm trying to write. I'm blessed if I know where the ideas come from, or how they pour into me like this, but--anyhow it's a new experience, and I want to make the most of it. I've never done imaginative work before, and--though it is a bit fantastical, mean to keep in touch with reality and show great truths that emerge from the commonest facts of life. The critics, of course, will blame me for not giving 'em the banal thing they expect from me, but what of that?' He was dreadfully reckless.

'I see,' said Mother, gazing open-mindedly into his face; 'but where does _my_ help come in, please?'

She leaned back, half-sighing, half-smiling. 'Here's my life'--she held up her needles--'and that's the soul of prosaic dulness, isn't it?'

'On the contrary,' he answered eagerly, 'it's reality. It's courage, patience, heroism. You're a spring-board for my fairy-tale, though I'd never realised it before. I shall put you in, just as you are. You'll be one of the earlier chapters.'

'Every one'll skip me, then, I'm afraid.'

'Not a bit,' he laughed gaily; 'they'll feel you all through the book. Their minds will rest on you. You'll be a foundation. "Mother's there," they'll say, "so it's all right. This isn't nonsense. We'll read on." And they will read on.'

'I'm all through it, then?'

'Like the binding that mothers the whole book, you see,' put in Rogers, delighted to see them getting on so well, yet amazed to hear his cousin talk so openly with her of his idea.

Daddy continued, unabashed and radiant. Hitherto, he knew, his wife's attitude, though never spoken, had been very different. She almost resented his intense preoccupation with stories that brought in so little cash. It would have been better if he taught English or gave lessons in literature for a small but regular income. He gave too much attention to these unremunerative studies of types she never met in actual life. She was proud of the reviews, and pasted them neatly in a big book, but his help and advice on the practical details of the children's clothing and education were so scanty. Hers seemed ever the main burden.

Now, for the first time, though she distrusted fantasy and deemed it destructive of action, she felt something real. She listened with a kind of believing sympathy. She noticed, moreover, with keen pleasure, that her attitude fed him. He talked so freely, happily about it all. Already her sympathy, crudely enough expressed, brought fuel to his fires. Some one had put starlight into her.

'He's been hungry for this all along,' she reflected; 'I never realised it. I've thought only of myself without knowing it.'

'Yes, I'll put you in, old Mother,' he went on, 'and Rogers and the children too. In fact, you're in it already,' he chuckled, 'if you want to know. Each of you plays his part all day long without knowing it.' He changed his seat, going over to the window-sill, and staring down upon them as he talked on eagerly. 'Don't you feel,' he said, enthusiasm growing and streaming from him, 'how all this village life is a kind of dream we act out against the background of the sunshine, while our truer, deeper life is hidden somewhere far below in half unconsciousness? Our daily doings are but the little bits that emerge, tips of acts and speech that poke up and out, masquerading as complete? In that vaster sea of life we lead below the surface lies my big story, my fairy-tale--when we sleep.' He paused and looked down questioningly upon them. 'When we sleep,' he repeated impressively, struggling with his own thought. 'You, Mother, while you knit and sew, slip down into that enormous under-sea and get a glimpse of the coloured pictures that pass eternally behind the veil. I do the same when I watch the twilight from my window in reverie. Sunshine obliterates them, but they go just the same. _You_ call it day- dreaming. Our waking hours are the clothes we dress the spirit in after its nightly journeys and activities. Imagination does not create so much as remember. Then, by transforming, it reveals.'

Mother sat staring blankly before her, utterly lost, while her husband flung these lumps of the raw material of his story at her--of its atmosphere, rather. Even Rogers felt puzzled, and hardly followed what he heard. The intricacies of an artistic mind were indeed bewildering. How in the world would these wild fragments weave together into any intelligible pattern?

'You mean that we travel when we sleep,' he ventured, remembering a phrase that Minks had somewhere used, 'and that our real life is out of the body?' His cousin was taking his thought---or was it originally Minks's?--wholesale.

Mother looked up gratefully. 'I often dream I'm flying,' she put in solemnly. 'Lately, in particular, I've dreamed of stars and funny things like that a lot.'