her a sort of religious sentiment, had caused in her a thrill of worship real, though faint, far more real than the worship of God that had been cultivated in her mind by her teachers. The old Druid stone had affected her child’s mind in somewhat the same way, but with a difference. The 29 Ju-ju was a familiar, she had even beaten and punched it when in a temper; the stone had always filled her with respect. 29 There are some people the doors of whose minds are absolutely closed on the past; we call them material and practical people; there are others in which the doors of division are a wee crack open, or even ajar, so that their lives are more or less haunted by whisperings from that strange land we call yesterday. In some of the Burmese and Japanese children the doors stand wide open so that they can see themselves as they were before they passed through the change called death, but the Westerners are denied this. In Phyl’s mind as a child one might suppose that through the doors ajar some recollections of forgotten gods once worshipped had stolen, and that the power of the Ju-ju and the Druids’ stone lay in their power of focussing those vague and wandering threads of remembrance. To-night this power seemed regained, for she passed from the contemplation of concrete images into a vague and pleasant state, an absolute idleness of the intellect akin to that which people call daydreaming. With her cloak wrapped round her she sat, elbows on knees and her chin in the palms of her hands giving herself up to Nothing before starting to resume her way to the house. Sitting like this she suddenly started and turned. Some one had called her: “Phylice!” 30 30 For a moment she fancied that it was a real voice, and then she knew that it was only a voice in her head, one of those sounds we hear when we are half asleep, one of those hails from dreamland that come now as the ringing of a bell that never has rung, or the call of a person who has never spoken. She rose up and resumed her way, striking along the glen to the open park, yet still the memory of that call pursued her. “Phylice!” It seemed Mr. Pinckney’s voice, it was his voice, she was sure of that now, and she amused herself by wondering why his
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