Our room is lighted by a single lamp that burns on the end wall away from the wall with the door. (I feel that the hall is dark and that the other room is dark and that the mountain is dark, and that the night holding the world is dark save for our lighted room.) The walls of our room are unpainted pine, the rafters break and cast into wild shapes the shadow of the lamp. The long wall opposite the windows is broken by no window, the lamp’s shadows do not fall there, its wood is white. All about is the night, for the house stands on the very mountain crest. Night has invaded even the hall, even the other room. And all about is silence. The mountain sinks in silence beyond our senses. And our senses like prisoned birds live in this shut room where alone there is not blackness and silence. We are I and Mildred, lovely in a gown of green that shimmers on her body like an emerald molten by the white flame of her flesh. We are I and Mildred and Mildred’s father, and both my parents, and Philip LaMotte and Doctor Isaac Stein. We are seven: brightly at ease and talking in this silent night upon a mountain top so high that the air about us moves not toward earth but the spaces; so high that these silences are bathed in a celestial prescience free from the marring noises of men. And straight from our room with its solitary lamp weaving deep shadows in the ceiling’s softness, the slope bears down dense into a depth too vast for the penetration even of our thoughts. Mildred is touching a guitar, and she sings: “As ye came from holy land Of Walsinghame, Met you not with my true love By the way as you came? How should I know your true love That have met many a one As I came from the holy land, That have come, that have gone? She is neither white nor brown, But as the heavens fair; There is none hath her form divine In the earth or the air. I have loved her all my youth, But now am old as you see: Love likes not the falling fruit, Nor the withered tree. Know that love is a careless child, And forgets the promise past: He is blind, he is deaf when he list, And in faith never fast. His desire is a dureless content, And a trustless joy; He is won with a world of despair, And is lost with a toy....” Singing her mediæval tune, she is one with it, and one with the silver strings that leap from her songful fingers. I watch Mildred, and Philip LaMotte by my side watches her: Philip LaMotte and I watch each other watching Mildred sing. We three are closest to the other room. At the room’s end away from us, beneath the lamp, sit my parents chatting with Doctor Stein. Close to the central window Mildred’s father plays a game of solitaire.