window flowed soft,
deceptive winds, fluttering the leaves of music on the piano,
stirring the clustered sheafs of growing jonquils and narcissus, so
that they swayed in their Chinese bowls.

Marya, in black, arranged her tiger-ruddy hair before an ancient
grotesquerie set with a reflecting glass in which, on some days, one
could see the form of the Lord Buddha, though none could ever tell
from whence the image came.

Where Vanya had left his music opened on the piano rack, the sacred
pages now stirred slightly as the soft wind blew; and scented bells of
Frisia swayed and bowed around a bowl where gold-fish glowed.

Marya, at the piano, reading at sight from his inked manuscript, came
presently to the end of what was scored there--merely the first sketch
for a little spring song.

Some day she would finish it as part of a new debt--new obligations
she had now assumed in the slowly increasing light of new beliefs.

As she laid Vanya's last manuscript aside, under it she discovered one
of her own--a cynical, ribald, pencilled parody which she remembered
she had scribbled there in an access of malicious perversity.

As though curious to sound the obscurer depths of what she had been
when this jeering cynicism expressed her mood, she began to read from
her score and words, playing and intoning:

"CROQUE-MITAINE.

"Parfait qu'on attend La Maree Rouge,
La chose est positive.
On n'sait pas quand el' bouge,
Mais on sait qu'el' arrive.
La Maree Rouge arrivera
Et tout le monde en crevera!

"Croque'morts, sacristains et abbes,
Dans leurs sacre's boutiques
Se cachent aupres des machabe's
En repetant des cantiques.
Pape, cardinal, et sacre soeur
Miaulent avec tout leurs cliques,
Lorsque les Bolsheviks reprenn 'nt en choeur;
Mort aux saligaudes chic!

"La Maree Rouge montera
Et la bourgeoisie en crevera!"

The vicious irony of the atrocious parody--words and music--died out
in the sunny silence: for a few moments the girl sat staring at the
scored page; then she leaned forward, and, taking the manuscript in
both hands, tore it into pieces.

She was still occupied in destroying the unclean thing when a servant
appeared, and in subdued voice annou