On the beach as they strolled back, it was her eyes—­shining with a soft, new radiance—­that first caught sight of something; her fancy that first grasped its significance.  “Look!” she cried.  In a bowl-like hollow of a big brown rock, the receding tide had left a little pool of sea-water.  “It’s left behind—­this bit of the infinite, unresting sea!” she said.  “Who knows what far, far shores it’s come from?  And now, here it is, and the great mother-sea’s gone off and left it.”

He smiled tenderly at her sweet whimsy.  “The great mother-sea will come back for it at sundown,” he reminded her.

“Yes—­yes”—­perhaps it was the coming separation between the two that made her voice quaver so sympathetically—­“the Infinite always comes back for us.  But we don’t always remember that it will!  This is such a little bit of the great sea.  Maybe it never was left alone before; maybe it doesn’t know how surely the waters that left it behind will come back for it this evening.  Maybe it’s—­it’s lonesome.  I—­I think I know how it feels.”

“And I,” he said.

“Next time you feel that way will you remember this brown rock and the tide that is so surely coming back tonight?” she asked.

“Indeed I will,” he told her.

“And so will I,” she went on.  “And I’ll try to remember, too, that perhaps it was put here for us to see and think of when we need encouragement—­just as, I dare say, we are left behind, sometimes, so that other lonely folk may see us and be reminded that——­” She stopped.

“That what?” he asked.

“Why!” she cried, “it’s the Secret!  The more you live, the more everything helps you to believe the Secret and to feel the brotherhood it brings.”

He looked guilty.  “I don’t deserve to know the Secret,” he said, “after last night.  But——­”

“But I am going to tell you,” she declared, “so when you’re far away from what you love most, or when you’re with people you think are different from you and do not understand, you can remember——­”

“Yes?” eagerly.

“Just remember—­and you’ve no idea how it helps until you’ve tried—­that everybody’s lonesome.  That’s the Secret.”