Miss Darcy was glad to listen. Marget began to read. Her old teacher
remembered that she had read well twenty years ago. She read better now.
The book was Lafcadio Hearn's _West Indies_. "We travel so," said
Linden. "We take a right journeyer and journey with him."
The fire flickered, then seemed to pass into actual fire of sun. They
were in Martinique, under Pelée, in Saint Pierre, in Grand Anse. Again
she was startled to feel how real it was. She touched, she knew, the
people of Martinique.
Later, when the book had been closed, when they had said good night, one
to the other, when she lay in bed in the dark quiet, she experienced
strongly what a certain number of times in her life she had been able to
experience faintly. She experienced coherence that was wider than old
coherences. She interlocked with this place and her hosts. She held
them, they held her. At the end of the week she must go afar. "But never
any more so far that I lose the tune--never any more!" She went to sleep
with a strange, fair feeling of sea about her. Not that the forest, the
hills and mountains, were not there, but she felt the sea likewise. "Of
course it is there, but I never thought to look at it or taste it! The
sea and mountains and they and me, threaded together, talking together!"
She slept.