Page:Between the twilights being studies of Indian women by one of themselves (IA betweentwilights00soraiala).pdf/14

viii blue-grays, in that peculiar heat-haze which belongs to May and September, and the pale curve of the new moon looks old and weary. Is not all Life marching towards the Silence? it seems to say.

Yes, the manner of its loitering is varied, but always, always, is it an hour of enchantment, this hour Between the Twilights: and it is my very own. I choose it, from out the day’s full sheaf, and I sit with it in the Silences on my roof-tree.

It was in this hour, through a hot summer, that the thoughts which make this little book came to me, and were written down. I had spent my days going in and out among my friends of the Zenana, and a great yearning was in my heart that others should know them as I did, in their simplicity and their wisdom.

The half is not yet told: much would not bear telling—I had no business to take strangers into the walled garden of our intimacy—and some things were too elusive for speech, but the sounds which have thridded the Silence have been echoes of reality, and I can only hope that they may convey some