e have no thought--no name. I had not thought of it as music
until I saw her face but she listened as well as saw, and her expression
changed as it changes when the pomp of a great orchestra breaks upon the
silence. It flashed to the chords of blood-red and gold that was burning
fire. It softened through the fugue of woven crimson gold and flame, to
the melancholy minor of ashes-of-roses and paling green, and so through
all the dying glories that faded slowly to a tranquil grey and left
the world to the silver melody of one sole star that dawned above the
ineffable heights of the snows. Then she listened as a child does to
a bird, entranced, with a smile like a butterfly on her parted lips. I
never saw such a power of quiet.

She and I were walking next day among the forest ways, the pine-scented
sunshine dappling the dropped frondage. We had been speaking of her
mother. "It is such a misfortune for her," she said thoughtfully, "that
I am not clever. She should have had a daughter who could have shared
her thoughts. She analyses everything, reasons about everything, and
that is quite out of my reach."

She moved beside me with her wonderful light step--the poise and balance
of a nymph in the Parthenon frieze.

"How do you see things?"

"See? That is the right word. I see things--I never reason about them.
They are. For her they move like figures in a sum. For me every one of
them is a window through which one may look to what is beyond."

"To where?"

"To what they really are--not what they seem."

I looked at her with interest.

"Did you ever hear of the double vision?"

For this is a subject on which the spiritually learned men of India,
like the great mystics of all the faiths, have much to say. I had
listened with bewilderment and doubt to the expositions of my Pandit
on this very head. Her simple words seemed for a moment the echo of his
deep and searching thought. Yet it surely could not be. Impossible.

"Never. What does it mean?" She raised clear unveiled eyes. "You must
forgive me for being so stupid, but it is my mother who is at home with
all these scientific phrases. I know none of them."

"It means that for some people the material universe--the things we see
with our eyes--is only a mirage, or say, a symbol, which either hides
or shadows forth the eternal truth. And in that sense they see things as
they really are, not as they seem to the rest of us. And whether this is
the statement of a trut