THE WINDOW

said enough, with his caustic saying that it would
not be fine to-morrow, this odious little man went
and rubbed it in all over again.

" Perhaps it will be fine to-morrow," she said,
smoothing his hair.

All she could do now was to admire the re-
frigerator, and turn the pages of the Stores list
in the hope that she might come upon something
like a rake, or a mowing-machine, which, with
its prongs and its handles, would need the greatest
skill and care in cutting out. All these young men
parodied her husband, she reflected; he said it
would rain; they said it would be a positive tornado.

But here, as she turned the page, suddenly her
search for the picture of a rake or a mowing-
machine was interrupted. The gruff murmur,
irregularly broken by the taking out of pipes
and the putting in of pipes which had kept on
assuring her, though she could not hear what
was said (as she sat in the window), that the
men were happily talking; this sound, which
had lasted now half an hour and had taken its
place soothingly in the scale of sounds pressing
on top of her, such as the tap of balls upon
bats, the sharp, sudden bark now and then,
" How's that? How's that? " of the children
playing cricket, had ceased; so that the monoton-
ous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the

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