d. Then she rose and looked again. She
saw no one in the cave. But the moment she stood upright she had a
marvellous sense that she was in the secret of the earth and all its
ways. Everything she had seen, or learned from books; all that her
grandmother had said or sung to her; all the talk of the beasts, birds,
and fishes; all that had happened to her on her journey with Mossy, and
since then in the heart of the earth with the Old man and the Older
man--all was plain: she understood it all, and saw that everything
meant the same thing, though she could not have put it into words
again.

The next moment she descried, in a corner of the cave, a little naked
child sitting on the moss. He was playing with balls of various colours
and sizes, which he disposed in strange figures upon the floor beside
him. And now Tangle felt that there was something in her knowledge
which was not in her understanding. For she knew there must be an
infinite meaning in the change and sequence and individual forms of the
figures into which the child arranged the balls, as well as in the
varied harmonies of their colours, but what it all meant she could not
tell.* He went on busily, tirelessly, playing his solitary game,
without looking up, or seeming to know that there was a stranger in his
deep-withdrawn cell. Diligently as a lace-maker shifts her bobbins, he
shifted and arranged his balls. Flashes of meaning would now pass from
them to Tangle, and now again all would be not merely obscure, but
utterly dark. She stood looking for a long time, for there was
fascination in the sight; and the longer she looked the more an
indescribable vague intelligence went on rousing itself in her mind.
For seven years she had stood there watching the naked child with his
coloured balls, and it seemed to her like seven hours, when all at once
the shape the balls took, she knew not why, reminded her of the Valley
of Shadows, and she spoke:--

"Where is the Old Man of the Fire?" she said.

* I think I must be indebted to Novalis for these geometrical figures.

"Here I am," answered the child, rising and leaving his balls on the
moss. "What can I do for you?"

There was such an awfulness of absolute repose on the face of the child
that Tangle stood dumb before him. He had no smile, but the love in his
large gray eyes was deep as the centre. And with the repose there lay
on his face a shimmer as of moonlight, which seemed as if any moment it
might break into