ow curtains that were
moving slightly to the almost imperceptible stirring of the air from
outside.

Beyond the curtains lay the golden afternoon. Sometimes a bird shadow, the
loveliest thing in shadow-land, would cross the curtains, sometimes a note
of song or the sound of a bird's flight from tree to tree would tell that
there was a garden down below. The street beyond the garden and the city
beyond the street could be heard, but were little more evident to the
senses than those things in a picture which we guess but cannot see.

Phyl, allowing her mind to be led by these faint and fugitive sounds, fell
into a reverie. Then she fell asleep and straight way began to dream.

She dreamed that Miss Pinckney was in the room moving about dusting
things, a duster in one hand, an open letter in the other. There was
troublous news of some sort in the letter, but what it was Miss Pinckney
would not say. Then the room turned into the piazza, where Juliet
Mascarene was standing with her hands on the rail, looking down on the
garden.

She seemed to know Juliet quite well and was not a bit surprised to see
her there; she touched her but she did not turn. Phyl slipped her arm
round Juliet's waist and stood with her looking at the garden, and as they
stood thus the most curious dream feeling came upon her, a feeling of
duality, Juliet was herself, she was Juliet. Then as this feeling died
away Juliet vanished and she was standing alone on the piazza.

Then she half woke, falling asleep again to be awakened fully by a sound.

A sound, deep, sonorous, now rhythmical, now confused. It was the sound of
guns.

She had heard it once long ago on the Brighton coast, and now as she sat
up every nerve and muscle tense, and her mind filled with a vague dread,
it came so heavily that the walls of Vernons shook.

She ran on to the piazza. There was no one there. The garden gate was wide
open, there was no one in the garden, and she noticed, though without any
astonishment, that some one had been at work in the garden altering the
paths. A white butterfly was flittering above the flowers, and a red bird
leaving the magnolia tree by the gate, flew, a splash of colour, across to
the garden beyond.

These things she saw but did not heed. She was under the spell of the
guns, the sound rose against the brightness of the day as a black cloud
rises across the sky or a sorrow across one's life, insistent, rhythmical,
a pall of sound now billowin