ing that
makes us feel sad, or happy, or strong, or weak?"

She did not answer for some time; she lay watching his face and fondling
his smooth red wings; and, presently, when she did begin to explain,
Jimbo found that the child in him was then paramount again, and he
could not quite follow what she said.

He tried to answer properly and seem interested, but her words were very
long and hard to understand, and after a time he thought she was talking
to herself more than to him, and he gave up all serious effort to
follow. Then he became aware that her voice had changed. The words
seemed to drop down upon him from a great height. He imagined she was
standing on one of those far stars he had been asking about, and was
shouting at him through an immense tube of sky and darkness. The words
pricked his ears like needle-points, only he no longer heard them as
words, but as tiny explosions of sound, meaningless and distant. Swift
flashes of light began to dance before his eyes, and suddenly from
underneath the tree, a wind rose up and rushed, laughing, across his
face. Darkness in a mass dropped over his eyes, and he sank backwards
somewhere into another corner of space altogether.

The governess, meanwhile, lay quite still, watching the limp form in the
branches beside her and still holding the tips of his red wings.
Presently tears stole into her eyes, and began to run down her cheeks.
One deep sigh after another escaped from her lips; but the little boy,
or the old soul, who was the cause of all her emotion, apparently was
far away and knew nothing of it. For a long time she lay in silence, and
then leaned a little nearer to him, so as to see his full face. The eyes
were wide open and staring, but they were looking at nothing she could
see, for the consciousness cannot be in two places at the same time, and
Jimbo just then was off on a little journey of his own, a journey that
was but preliminary to the great final one of all.

"Jimbo," whispered the girl between her tears and sighs, "Jimbo! Where
have you gone to? Tell me, are they getting ready for you at last, and
am I to lose you after all? Is this the only way I can save you--by
losing you?"

There was no answer, no sign of movement; and the governess hid her face
in her hands and cried quietly to herself, while her tears dropped down
through the branches of the tree and fell into the rain-pools beneath.

For Jimbo's state of oblivion in the tree was in reality a