“Daphnis!” he ejaculated, with a flash of intuition.

He threw himself forward impulsively, in a mad attempt to approach the wonderful phantasm.  As he did so, the colours lost their sheen, and the figure faded into transparency.  By the time he was near enough to touch it, it was no longer there, and the next instant he found himself clinging to the cold stone margin of the old fountain, all alone upon the lawn in the fast gathering twilight, shivering, panting, marvelling, but exultant in the consciousness of having been vouchsafed just one glimpse of the being who, so long unseen, had constituted for many years his cherished ideal of physical and spiritual beauty.

He leant upon the fountain, in the spot that the vision had occupied.  “And I believe he’s always been here—­all these many years,” mused the boy, coming gradually to himself again.  “He has stood beside me, often and often, inspiring me with beautiful ideas, though I never guessed it, never suspected it for a single moment.  And now he has shown himself to me at last.  The fountain is haunted, haunted by the beautiful earth-spirit that has been my guide, that I’ve dreamt of all my life without ever having seen him.  It’s a sacred fountain now—­like the fountains of old Hellas, sacred with the hauntings of the gods.  And he actually drank of the water—­or was going to, if I hadn’t frightened him away.  Perhaps he’s still here, although I can’t see him any more.  I wonder whether he knows my mother.  It may be that they’re great friends, and keep watch over me together.  How wonderful it all is!”

Then he walked slowly and rather painfully back to the house.  He was in great spirits that night at dinner, though he ate no more than would have satisfied a bird, greatly to his aunt’s disturbance.  With much tact he abstained from saying anything to her about the extraordinary experience he had just gone through, feeling very justly that, though she seemed more or less reconciled to the ministry of angels, Daphnis was frankly a pagan spirit, and would, as such, be open to grave suspicion from the standpoint of his aunt’s orthodoxy.  But it didn’t matter much, after all.  He was happy in the consciousness that every day he was getting into nearer touch with a beautiful world that he could not see as yet, but in the existence of which he now believed as firmly as in that of his own garden.  The spirit-land was fast becoming a reality to him, and although he had never beheld the glories of its scenery he had actually had a visit from two of its inhabitants.  That, he thought, constituted the difference between Aunt Charlotte and himself.  She believed in some place she called heaven, and had a vague notion that it was like a sort of religious transformation-scene, millions of miles away, up somewhere in the sky.  He, on the contrary, knew that the spirit-world was all around him, because he had had ocular as well as intuitive demonstration of its proximity.