. They were trying to heap up for themselves proof that they might
still be near each other. And, above all, his effort was to save her
from the worst, worst woe. And I understood, too, why something wiser
and stronger than myself had led me to tell the dream which was not a
dream at all.

But it was as she said; the world had not learned the Secret yet. And
there we stood. We did not cry or talk, but we clung to each other--we
CLUNG. That is all human creatures can do until the Secret is known. And
as we clung the nightingale broke out again.

"O nightingale! O nightingale!" she said in her low wonder of a voice.
"WHAT are you trying to tell us!"

CHAPTER VIII

What I feel sure I know by this time is that all the things we think
happen by chance and accident are only part of the weaving of the scheme
of life. When you begin to suspect this and to watch closely you also
begin to see how trifles connect themselves with one another, and seem
in the end to have led to a reason and a meaning, though we may not
be clever enough to see it clearly. Nothing is an accident. We make
everything happen ourselves: the wrong things because we do not know
or care whether we are wrong or right, the right ones because we
unconsciously or consciously choose the right even in the midst of our
ignorance.

I dare say it sounds audacious for an ordinary girl to say such things
in an ordinary way; but perhaps I have said them in spite of myself,
because it is not a bad thing that they should be said by an every-day
sort of person in simple words which other every-day people can
understand. I am only expressing what has gradually grown into belief in
my mind through reading with Angus ancient books and modern ones--books
about faiths and religions, books about philosophies and magics, books
about what the world calls marvels, but which are not marvels at all,
but only workings of the Law most people have not yet reasoned about or
even accepted.

Angus had read and studied them all his life before he began to read
them with me, and we talked them over together sitting by the fire in
the library, fascinated and staring at each other, I in one high-backed
chair and he in another on the opposite side of the hearth. Angus is
wonderful--wonderful! He KNOWS there is no such thing as chance.
He KNOWS that we ourselves are the working of the Law--and that we
ourselves could work what now are stupidly called "miracles" if we could
only remem