imself
when I came to ask them where the child had gone, and told him of the
big, dark man with the scar on his forehead. After that they were sure.

They had always hidden their knowledge from me because they were afraid
it might frighten me to be told. I had not been a strong child. They
kept the secret from my relatives because they knew they would dislike
to hear it and would not believe, and also would dislike me as a queer,
abnormal creature. Angus had fears of what they might do with doctors
and severe efforts to obliterate from my mind my "nonsense," as they
would have been sure to call it. The two wise souls had shielded me on
every side.

"It was better that you should go on thinking it only a simple, natural
thing," Angus said. "And as to natural, what IS natural and what is not?
Man has not learned all the laws of nature yet. Nature's a grand, rich,
endless thing, always unrolling her scroll with writings that seem new
on it. They're not new. They were always written there. But they were
not unrolled. Never a law broken, never a new law, only laws read with
stronger eyes."

Angus and I had always been very fond of the Bible--the strange old
temple of wonders, full of all the poems and tragedies and histories of
man, his hates and battles and loves and follies, and of the Wisdom of
the universe and the promises of the splendors of it, and which even
those of us who think ourselves the most believing neither wholly
believe nor will understand. We had pored over and talked of it. We had
never thought of it as only a pious thing to do. The book was to us one
of the mystic, awe-inspiring, prophetic marvels of the world.

That was what made me say, half whispering: "I have wondered and
wondered what it meant--that verse in Isaiah: 'Behold the former things
are come to pass and new things do I declare; before they spring forth I
tell you of them.' Perhaps it means only the unrolling of the scroll."

"Aye, aye!" said Angus; "it is full of such deep sayings, and none of us
will listen to them."

"It has taken man eons of time," Hector MacNairn said, thinking it out
as he spoke--"eons of time to reach the point where he is beginning to
know that in every stock and stone in his path may lie hidden some
power he has not yet dreamed of. He has learned that lightning may be
commanded, distance conquered, motion chained and utilized; but he, the
one CONSCIOUS force, has never yet begun to suspect that of all others