rn! What had been the previous
existences of his father and his mother? If they had a right to share in
his future, surely he had a right to share in their pasts. He looked up
at her. But something in her face--a look of life hard-lived, the
mysterious impress of emotions, experience, and suffering-seemed, with
its incalculable depth, its purchased sanctity, to make curiosity
impertinent. His mother must have had a wonderfully interesting life;
she was so beautiful, and so--so--but he could not frame what he felt
about her. He got up, and stood gazing down at the town, at the plain
all green with crops, and the ring of mountains glamorous in sinking
sunlight. Her life was like the past of this old Moorish city, full,
deep, remote--his own life as yet such a baby of a thing, hopelessly
ignorant and innocent! They said that in those mountains to the West,
which rose sheer from the blue-green plain, as if out of a sea,
Phoenicians had dwelt--a dark, strange, secret race, above the land! His
mother's life was as unknown to him, as secret, as that Phoenician past
was to the town down there, whose cocks crowed and whose children played
and clamoured so gaily, day in, day out. He felt aggrieved that she
should know all about him and he nothing about her except that she loved
him and his father, and was beautiful. His callow ignorance--he had not
even had the advantage of the War, like nearly everybody else!--made him
small in his own eyes.

That night, from the balcony of his bedroom, he gazed down on the roof of
the town--as if inlaid with honeycomb of jet, ivory, and gold; and, long
after, he lay awake, listening to the cry of the sentry as the hours
struck, and forming in his head these lines:

"Voice in the night crying, down in the old sleeping
Spanish city darkened under her white stars!

"What says the voice-its clear-lingering anguish?
Just the watchman, telling his dateless tale of safety?
Just a road-man, flinging to the moon his song?

"No! Tis one deprived, whose lover's heart is weeping,
Just his cry: 'How long?'"

The word "deprived" seemed to him cold and unsatisfactory, but "bereaved"
was too final, and no other word of two syllables short-long came to him,
which would enable him to keep "whose lover's heart is weeping." It was
past two by the time he had finished it, and past three before he went to
sleep, having said it over to himself at least twenty-fo