light which glowed and
waned on the ceiling, she awaited the flowing tide on which so often
she had embarked and drifted out into that golden gloom serene, where,
spirit becalmed, Time and Grief faded, and Desire died out upon the
unshadowed sea of dreams.

It is long waiting for the tide when the wakeful heart beats loudly,
when the pulses quicken at a memory, and the thousand idle little
cellules of the brain, long sealed, long unused, and consigned to the
archives of What Is Ended, open one by one, releasing each its own
forgotten ghost.

And how can the heart rest, the pulse sleep, startled to a flutter, as
one by one the tiny cells unclose unbidden, and the dead remembrance,
from its cerements freed, brightens to life?

Words he had used, the idle lifting of his head, the forgotten
inflection of his voice, the sunlight on his hair and the sea-wind
stirring it; his figure as it turned to move away, the half-caught echo
of his laugh, faint, faint!--so that her own ears, throbbing, strained
to listen; the countless unimportant moments she had thought unmarked,
yet carefully stored up, without her knowledge, in the magic cellules
of her brain--all, all were coming back to life, more and more distinct,
startlingly clear.

And she lay like one afraid to move, lest her stirring waken a vague
something that still slept, something she dared not arouse, dared not
meet face to face, even in dreams. An interval--perhaps an hour, perhaps
a second--passed, leaving her stranded so close to the shoals of slumber
that sleep passed only near enough to awaken her.

The room was very still and dim, but the clamour in her brain unnerved
her, and she sat up among the cushions, looking vacantly about her with
the blue, confused eyes, the direct, unseeing gaze of a child roused by
a half-heard call.

The call--low, imperative, sustained--continued softly persistent
against her windows--the summons of the young year's rain.

She went to the window and stood among the filmy curtains, looking out
into the mist; a springlike aroma penetrated the room. She opened the
window a little way, and the sweet, virile odour enveloped her.

A thousand longings rose within her; unnumbered wistful questions
stirred her, sighing, unanswered.

Aware that her lips were moving unconsciously, she listened to the words
forming automatic repetitions of phrases long forgotten:

"And those that look out of the windows be darkened, And the door shall
b