Page:Following darkness (IA followingdarknes00reid).pdf/47

 painted! Why had no one cared for her? Perhaps someday, between twilight and dusk, she would slip into my room and sing to me, "Rose softly Blooming," or "Voi che sapete! " A rustle of muslin, a ghostly scent of ghostly flowers, the twangling notes of the spinet, and a voice singing a song that would sound thin and far off, like the sound of wind—that is how it would happen.

I was charmed with these fancies, but I stood there only a few minutes, for there was something odd in that silence of closed doors and listening portraits, and I returned to the sunshine of my room. I went to the window and leaned my forehead against the pane and looked out. Far away I could see a stretch of sand, streaked with streams and pools of water, for the tide was out: and beyond the sand, clear in the sunlight, was the sea, blue-green under the soft blue sky, marked with indigo and purple where the bottom was formed of rocks and seaweed. At the water's edge some children—from this distance I could not make out who they were—were sailing toy boats. With trousers and petticoats well rolled up from bare brown legs, with their scarlet jerseys and caps and striped cotton dresses, they formed a bright note of colour, and brought me into touch again with life out of doors. On the left horn of the bay's crescent the sand-hills, with their sparse covering of bleached, wan grass, were pale and iridescent in the sun.

A gardener was mowing the grass just below my window, and the sleepy sound of the mowing-machine was delightful, and the smell of the fresh green grass, turned over in bright cool heaps. I got back into bed again, and took up "Bevis."

I read for half an hour, when my eyes once more grew tired. The sound of the mowing-machine had ceased, and a deep silence filled the afternoon. I lay listening to the silence, half-asleep, half-awake, when all at once I heard a sound of scraping under my window. It flashed across