THE WINDOW

looked at the window in which the candle flames
burnt brighter now that the panes were black, and
looking at that outside the voices came to her very
strangely, as if they were voices at a service in a
cathedral, for she did not listen to the words. The
sudden bursts of laughter and then one voice
(Minta's) speaking alone, reminded her of men and
boys crying out the Latin words of a service in some
Roman Catholic cathedral. She waited. Her
husband spoke. He was repeating something,
and she knew it was poetry from the rhythm and
the ring of exaltation and melancholy in his voice:

Come out and climb the garden path,

Luriana Lurilee.
The China rose is all abloom and buzzing with the yellow bee.

The words (she was looking at the window)
sounded as if they were floating like flowers on
water out there, cut off from them all, as if no one
had said them, but they had come into existence
of themselves.

all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be
^e full of trees and changing leaves.

She did not know what they meant, but, like
music, the words seemed to be spoken by her own
voice, outside her self, saying quite easily and
naturally what had been in her mind the whole
evening while she said different things. She knew,

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