he may be the one as yet the least explored. How do we know that there
does not lie in each of us a wholly natural but, so far, dormant power
of sight--a power to see what has been called The Unseen through all the
Ages whose sightlessness has made them Dark? Who knows when the
Shadow around us may begin to clear? Oh, we are a dull lot--we human
things--with a queer, obstinate conceit of ourselves."

"Complete we think we are," Angus murmured half to himself. "Finished
creatures! And look at us! How many of us in a million have beauty
and health and full power? And believing that the law is that we must
crumple and go to pieces hour by hour! Who'd waste the time making a
clock that went wrong as often? Nay, nay! We shall learn better than
this as time goes on. And we'd better be beginning and setting our minds
to work on it. 'Tis for us to do--the minds of us. And what's the mind
of us but the Mind that made us? Simple and straight enough it is when
once you begin to think it out. The spirit of you sees clearer than we
do, that's all," he said to me. "When your mother brought you into the
world she was listening to one outside calling to her, and it opened the
way for you."

At night Hector MacNairn and his mother and I sat on the terrace under
stars which seemed listening things, and we three drew nearer to one
another, and nearer and nearer.

"When the poor mother stumbled into the train that day," was one of the
things Hector told me, "I was thinking of The Fear and of my own mother.
You looked so slight and small as you sat in your corner that I thought
at first you were almost a child. Then a far look in your eyes made me
begin to watch you. You were so sorry for the poor woman that you could
not look away from her, and something in your face touched and puzzled
me. You leaned forward suddenly and put out your hand protectingly as
she stepped down on to the platform.

"That night when you spoke quite naturally of the child, never doubting
that I had seen it, I suddenly began to suspect. Because of The
Fear"--he hesitated--"I had been reading and thinking many things new to
me. I did not know what I believed. But you spoke so simply, and I knew
you were speaking the truth. Then you spoke just as naturally of Wee
Brown Elspeth. That startled me because not long before I had been told
the tale in the Highlands by a fine old story-teller who is the head of
his clan. I saw you had never heard the story before. And ye