iling white, with
knots of rich blue here and there, came through a green gate in the
side hedge and moved with a rich, swooping step toward the basket.
Behind her through the open gate I saw a further lawn white with
drying linen, and a quick, pleasant glimpse of a brown, broad woman in
an old-world cap, paring fruit under an apple tree, a yellow cat
basking at her feet.

The white-clad figure leaned over the basket, her deep-brimmed garden
hat completely shading her face, lifted from it a struggling, tiny
doll-creature, with a reddish-gold aureole above its rosy face,
dandled it a moment in her arms, then sank like a settling gull into
the hollow of a low seat-shaped boulder near the wistaria, fumbled a
moment at the bosom of her lacy gown, and while I held my breath,
before I could turn my eyes, gave it her breast. It pressed its
wandering, blind hands into that miraculous, ivory globe (that
pattern of the living world) and through the dense, warm stillness of
that garden spot, where the bees' hum was the very music of silence,
there sounded, so gradually that I could not tell when the first notes
stirred the soundlessness, a curious cooing and gurgling, a sort of
fluty chuckle, a rippling, greedy symphony. It was not one voice, for
below the cheeping treble of the suckling mite ran a lowing undertone,
a murmurous, organ-like music, a sort of maternal fugue, that imitated
and dictated at once that formless, elemental melody. Even as we stood
riveted to the threshold, the sounds echoed in the air above us,
seemed to descend mystically from the very heavens themselves, and as
my heart swelled in me, a flock of pigeons swept down from some
barnyard eyrie and dropped musically, in a cloud of grey and amethyst,
beneath the pear tree. They crooned together there, the woman, the
child and the birds, and truly it was not altogether human, that
harmony, but like the notes of the pure and healthy animals (or the
angels, may be?) that guard this living world from the fate of the
frozen and exhausted moon.

"I--I can't get used to it," said Roger abruptly, "it--it seems too
much, somehow," and we turned back into the room.

"It's not a bit too much for you, Roger!" I answered heartily (thank
God, how heartily!) and we drew deep breaths and welcomed Miss Jencks,
in irreproachable white duck--I had almost written white ducks--and
talked about my momentous health.

Miss Jencks had abandoned her seaman's comforters for a cooler