I myself Reine Wilson, entertaining a strange young man in whom I felt a subtle and bewildering and intoxicating attraction? Destiny was in this-æons of patient evolution and change, wars and disasters and ages of darkness, the sandlike siftings of laws and stars, had all worked for the fulfilment of this ultimate minute, this perfect flowering of two meeting minds. I could not be mistaken in my belief that it was the same for her as for me. With the deep tremor in my own soul, I could feel the tremor in hers. If it were not true, she could not possibly be holding her teacup as she did, or frowning slightly as she did, or withholding, as she deliciously did, the smile of delighted confession which I knew she was near to giving me.

"You know-" I then added-"I think that dream is marvellous-simply marvellous."

"Do you!" she cried. "But how lovely! You really liked it? You didn't think there was too much of it? . . ." She leaned toward me with the eagerness of a schoolgirl, her eyes wide with intensity.

"Too much of it! Heavens no. I was never so enthralled by anything in my life."

with a smile still charmingly lighting her small face, gazed downward abstractedly at the Khelim rug. I knew what she meant by "extraordinary "-she meant that it was extraordinary that two minds should find each other as swiftly and easily as ours did. I knew also that she would not want the strangeness of this, and its beauty, too explicitly noted. For that would be to spoil it.

"Yes," I sighed, "it is. . . . Can I steal another scone?"

"Do!... Have one of the underneath ones-they're hotter!"

I took one, and returned to the couch. The room had suddenly darkened-it had clouded up—and a momentary patter of drops on the leaves of the thorntree sounded in the silence, as if it were inside the room.

"You mean the sound of it? . . .”

"No-everything. The sound, yes, but also the light-rain has always had for me, ever since I can remember, a special sort of magic. On rainy days I experience a special kind of delicious melancholy-a melancholy that is happy, if that means anything to you. I brood, my imagination is set free, I am restless and depressed, and yet at the same time it is as if something inside me wanted to sing. . Don't I sound like a sentimental idiot?"

"Oh!" she said, "how nice of you!" She rose, very gingerly, and coming to the end of the couch rested her two hands on the blue-canvas arm, one hand on top of the other. As she looked out through the window at the thorn-tree, watching the small leaves courtsey and genuflect to the raindrops, and then spring up again released, I felt as if I were going to tremble. I found myself thinking about her heart again-she looked so astonishingly frail. How could so frail a body, a body so ethereally and transparently slight, contain a spirit so vivid? One felt that with the slightest flutter the bright bird might escape and be gone.

"Yes," she said, in almost a whisper, as if to herself, "it is beautiful . . . beautiful. It does make one want to sing. And how the thrushes adore it!"

"I remember-" I said-" how once,

when I was a small boy, I went bathing in the sea on a darkish day. While I was swimming, it began to rain. I was at first astonished-almost frightened. The water was smooth-there was no sound of waves-and all about me arose a delicate and delicious seething, the low sound of raindrops on the sea. It was a ghostly and whispering sound-there was something sinister in it, and also something divinely soothing. I lay on my back and floated, letting the drops fall on my face while I looked up at the clouds-and then I swam very softly, so as to be able to listen. I don't believe I was ever happier in my life. It was as if I had gone into another world. . . . And then, when I went ashore, I remember how I ran to the bathing-hut, for fear of getting wet! . . ." "Of course!" she cried. "Of course you would! . . .”

She sank down on the couch, facing me. And then she went on:

"You've given me back something I had forgotten. . . It must have been when I was eleven or twelve. It was raining very hard-it was pouring-and when I went down to the library to practise at the piano the room was dark, with that kind of morning darkness that engulfs one. The French windows were open onto the garden, but the curtains hung perfectly still, for there was no wind, no current of air. One of those heavy, straight rains, on a quiet day-a rain as solid and serried as rain in a Japanese print. . . . I went into the room and closed the door behind me and it seemed to me, so massive and insistent was the sound of the rain from the garden, with all its multitudinous patter and spatter, that the room itself was full of rain. The sounds were the sound of water, the light was the light of waterit was as if I were a fish in a darkened aquarium. I stood still for a long while, just drinking it in and staring out at the drenched garden, where all the trees and shrubs were bowed down under the unrelenting downpour. Not long before, I had seen somewhere some photographs greatly enlarged, of raindrops falling into water: and now, as I went to the open French windows, I watched the large bright eave-drops splashing into the puddles on the brick terrace, and I was en

chanted to see that my drops were exactly like those. They made the most exquisite little silvery water-spouts and umbrellas and toadstools, and all with such a heavenly clucking and chuckling and chirruping. The bubbles winked and were gone is there anything so evanescent as a rain-bubble?-and other bubbles came, sliding a fraction of an inch to right or left before they burst. . . . I had a strange feeling, then, as I turned to go to the piano-I felt as if I belonged to the rain, or as if I were the rain itself. I had a sensation in my throat that was like sadness, but was also ecstatic-something like your desire to sing. I looked at the glossy black grand piano-and that too had a watery look, like a dark pool gleaming under a heavy overhang of foliage. And when I sat down on the cool piano-stool, and touched timidly my fingers to the keys, the keys too were cold, and it was as if I were dipping my hands into the clearest of rain-water. . . . Is it any wonder that the music sounded to me like the drops pattering and spattering in the garden? I was delighted to the point of obsession with this idea. I played a little sonata through three times, luxuriating in its arpeggios and runs, which I took pianissimo, and feeling as if I were helping the rain to rain. . . . Good heavens! If I had only known the Handel Water-Music Suite! The illusion would have been perfect. . . ."

"It's so perfect for me," I said, "that I am tempted to look at your hands to see if they are still wet."

We smiled at each other, then, our eyes meeting with a shyness that was not altogether a shyness; and after a moment, by a common impulse, turned to look out at the red-blossomed tree, from which arose a soft irregular patter. We were silent for a long while. In fact, I think we sat there in complete silence till the nurse-companion came back again for the teathings; and I remember noticing everything, every minutest detail, in the small brick-walled garden. A laburnum-tree at the farther end with long pendulous blossoms, of so bright a yellow that it gave one the illusion of sunlight against the dark wall. And a row of lupins along a flagged path, with a bright eye of water

in every one of the dark hand-shaped leaves. . . . These things are still vivid in my memory. But what we said to each other after that I cannot recall. I don't think we said very much. We felt, I think, that we had already said all that was essential. I do remember Reine's saying that "Wilson" had gone off somewhere to play cricket: and also she said something about a dismal female teaparty to which she had gone in Earl's Court the day before. But that, I think, was all; and not long afterward I rose and came away.

IV

I NEVER saw her again. In the first place, I funked it-I was afraid that I couldn't keep it up. The thing was so exquisite as it stood, so perfect and besides, what could I do? It seemed to me that almost anything after that, would be an anticlimax. If I were to go again, there might be some one else there we should have to be stiff and distant with each other-or we wouldn't be able to talk to each other at all. Wilson might be there, with his loud fake enthusiasms and his horrible Oxford manner and his sprawling tweed legs. .

At bottom, however, it was a kind of terror that kept me away. I was in love with her, and I had more than a hope that she was very nearly in love with me. But hadn't we already had the finest of it? The thing, as it stood, was all bloom and fragrance; and mightn't it be only too appallingly easy by some unguarded shaking of the tree, to destroy the whole rare miracle? . . . Wouldn't I-to use a less poetic image-let the cat out of the bag, if I were to go again? And then there was her bad heart, and the fact that we were both, alas, married. The complications and miseries, if we did allow the meeting to go further, might well be fatal to both of us.

Even so, I am not sure that I wouldn't have gone, had not fate in the guise of the Foreign Office intervened. I was sent, only a few weeks later, to Rome, where my duties kept me for a year and a half. It was while I was there that "Scherzo" came out in book-form. Estlin sent me a copy-and I at once sat down and wrote

a letter to Reine, a brief one, telling her again of the incomparable delight it gave me. It was a month or more before I heard from her and then came a short note from Seville. It was rather cool, rather cryptic, distinctly guarded. She thanked me formally, she was glad I liked the dream so much, she felt, as I did, that the ending was perhaps a shade "tricky," of a "surprise" sort which didn't quite "go" with the tone of the rest. That was all. But there was also a postscript at the bottom of the page, which seemed to me to be in a handwriting a little less controlled-as if she had hesitated about adding it, and had then, impulsively, dashed it in at the last minute. This was simply: "I always think of you as the man who loves rain.' . . . That was all. It was only a few weeks after this, when, opening The Times in a small café in the Via Tritoni, I was shocked to see her name in the column of death announcements. "Suddenly, at Paris, on the 18th of March." . . . Suddenly, at Paris, on the 18th of March! . . . I sat and stared stupidly at the announcement, leaving untouched on the little table before me my granita di cafe con pana. . . . Reine Wilson was dead-Reine was dead. That little girl who had stood in the dark room by the French windows, her sleeve brushing the stirless curtains, watching the rain

I sat

who had dipped her hands through the clearest rain-water to the white piano keys-and seen the little umbrellas of silver-was dead. I got up and walked out blindly into the bright street. Without knowing how I got there, I found myself presently in the Borghese Gardens. There was a little pond, in which a great number of ducks were sailing to and fro, gabbling and quacking, and children were throwing bread into the water. down on a bench under a Judas-tree-it was in blossom, and the path under it was littered with purple. An Italian mother slapped the hand of her small boy who was crying, and said harshly "Piangi! Piangi!... Cry! Cry! ... And I too felt like weeping, but I shed no tears. Reine Wilson the novelist was still alive; but Reine Wilson the dark-haired little girl with whom I had fallen in love was dead, and it seemed to me that I too was dead.

HE long curtains were drawn back to let the light into the parlor, and the windows were open a little way. Mrs. Solz was dusting. She had a girl who did the lodgers' rooms and things like that, but she always attended to the front room herself. For that had to look like something when new people came; the house had to seem as if it was well kept.

She was doing the mantel; she'd always liked that mantel; it was of black, shining stone, with some fine scrolled lines all through it filled with gilt. Well-to-do people had built the house, and they'd had good taste. Mrs. Solz liked things that had dignity. On the mantel was a glass globe, covering a stuffed canary; that was Freddie! He sat there on the little twig just like he used to do when she was a girl and they lived in Sanders Street. He had a gilt cage then, and they'd hung it in the window and he'd sing beautiful when the sun came in. Except that his feathers weren't so good, he looked just the same as he did then; and if she didn't know his eyes were glass, she'd say they were looking right at her the way they used to do. Her mother loved Freddie; it's wonderful the way you get to care for things! She'd sit and talk to him so, you'd think he was a person; she'd feed him bits of things and he'd hold his head sidewise and chirp. And she used to talk German to him sometimes, and, honest to God, you'd think he understood it.

They always hung his cage in the front window; it was awful nice for him there; he liked it and would hop around and drink his water and pick at his seed. But Mr. Ott, who lived across the street, would blow the trombone on Sunday

morning. He was practising; his wife said it was the only time he had. If it was summer and the windows were open, Freddie got awful worked up. He'd flap his wings and carry on. Sometimes they had to take him out into the kitchen, just to get his mind off it.

A man outside was calling for old bottles and metals; he had a pleading note in his voice that always seemed pitiful to Mrs. Solz; but she hoped he wouldn't stop and poke among the rubbish-cans at the curb, because that made a dust, and it came in the windows. She looked out to make sure, but he passed on, limping and desolate, without disturbing anything. The shabby trees were beginning to bud in the square; the sun was warm, and the groups of greasy, wan-looking people were talking on the benches. Men were digging in the flower-beds, getting the ground ready.

She put the little globe, with the canary inside, in its place on the mantel. Her father had never cared for Freddie; not from the first time it'd been brought into the house. He'd never speak to it except times when he was drunk, and then he'd stand by the cage and cry. Her father had been a peculiar man. He was a cracker baker, but he'd always wanted to be a salesman. He'd been the kind of man that always wanted to go places. He loved it. Days when he wasn't working he'd go down to the station and stand looking at the big trains that were ready to start West. He liked to see the porters carrying bags, and the trucks with the trunks on them; and he liked to stand near where the man punched the tickets and hear what people'd say. Those were the days he'd get drunk. He'd always come home and cry. He had to stay in a basement baking crackers when he ought to be sitting at a window in a Pullman car looking at towns he'd often