“With the right people at each end, why not?” said Desire.  “But O, Mr. Kirkbright! how can I tell you!  It is such a great idea; and I don’t know anything.”

These words, that she happened to say, brought back to her—­by one of those little lightning threads that hold things together, and flash and thrill our recollections through us—­the rainy morning when she went round in the storm to her Aunt Ripwinkley’s, because she could not sit in the bay-window at home, and wonder whether “it was all finished,” or whether anybody had got to contrive anything more, “before they could sit behind plate-glass and let it rain.”  She remembered it all by those same words that she had spoken then to Rachel Froke,—­“Behold, we know not anything,—­Tennyson and I!”

Nonsense stays by us, often, in stickier fashion than sense does; that is the good of nonsense, perhaps; it sticks, and draws the sense along after it.

“I think one thing is certain,” said Mr. Kirkbright.  “Human creatures are made for ‘moving on.’  I believe the Swedenborgians are right in this,—­that the places above, or below, are filled from the human race, or races; and that the Lord Himself couldn’t do much with beings made as He has made us, without places to move us into.  New beginnings,—­evenings and mornings; the very planet cannot go on its way without making them for itself.  Life bound down to poor conditions,—­and all conditions are poor in the sense of being limited while the life is resistlessly expanding,—­festers; fevers; breaks out in violence and disease.  I believe we want new places more than anything.  I came up here on purpose to see if I could not begin one.”

“How happened you to come just here?” questioned Desire.  “What could you know of this, beforehand?”

“My sister had Miss Argenter’s letter; and at once she remembered the name of the place and its story.  That is the way things come together, you know.  My brother-in-law, Mr. Sherrett, owns, or did own, this whole property.  A ‘dead stick,’ he thought it.  Well, Aaron’s rod was another dead stick.  But he laid it up before the Lord, and it blossomed.”

Desire sat silent, looking at the white water in its gracious hurry.  Pouring itself away, unused,—­unheeded; yet waiting there, pouring always.  The tireless impulse of the divine help; vehement; eager, with a human eagerness; yet so patient, till men’s hands should reach out and lay hold of it!

She dreamed out a whole dream of life that might grow up beside this help; of work that might be done there.  She forgot that she was lingering, and keeping Mr. Kirkbright lingering, behind the others.

“You would have to live here yourself, I should think,” she said at length, speaking out of her vision of the things that might be, and so—­would have to be.  She had got drawn in to the contemplation of the scheme, and had begun to weigh and arrange, involuntarily, its details, forgetting that she “knew not anything.”