Mamma got up and leaned over you and covered you with the rug. Her white face quivered above you in the dusk. Her mouth pushed out to yours, making a small sound like a moan. You heard yourself cry: "Mamma, Mamma, you are adorable!" That was you. II. And as if Mark had never gone, as if that awful thing had never happened to Dan, as if she had never had those thoughts about her mother, her hidden happiness came back to her. Unhappiness only pushed it to a longer rhythm. Nothing could take it away. Anything might bring it: the smell of the white dust on the road; the wind when it came up out of nowhere and brushed the young wheat blades, beat the green flats into slopes where the white light rippled and ran like water, set the green field shaking and tossing like a green sea; the five elm trees, stiff, ecstatic dancers, holding out the broken-ladder pattern of their skirts; haunting rhymes, sudden cadences; the grave "_Ubique_" sounding through the Beethoven Sonata. Its thrill of reminiscence passed into the thrill of premonition, of something about to happen to her. XVI I. Poems made of the white dust, of the wind in the green corn, of the five trees--they would be the most beautiful poems in the world. Sometimes the images of these things would begin to move before her with persistence, as if they were going to make a pattern; she could hear a thin cling-clang, a moving white pattern of sound that, when she tried to catch it, broke up and flowed away. The image pattern and the sound pattern belonged to each other, but when she tried to bring them together they fell apart. That came of reading too much Byron. How was it that patterns of sound had power to haunt and excite you? Like the "potnia, potnia nux" that she found in the discarded Longfellow, stuck before his "Voices of the Night." Potnia, potnia nux, hypnodoteira ton polyponon broton, erebothen ithi, mole, mole katapteros ton Agamemnonion epi domon. She wished she knew Greek; the patterns the sounds made were so hard and still. And there were bits of patterns, snapt off, throbbing wounds of sound that couldn't heal. Lines out of Mark's Homer. Mark's Greek books had been taken from her five years ago, when Rodney went to Chelmsted. And they had come back with Rodney this Easter. They stood on the shelf in Mark's bedroom, above his writing-table. One day she found her mother there, dusting and arranging the books. Besides the little shabby Oxford Homers there were an Aeschylus, a Sophocles, two volumes of Aristophanes, clean and new, three volumes of Euripides and a Greek Testament. On the table a well-preserved Greek Anthology, bound in green, with the owner's name, J.C. Ponsonby, stamped on it in gilt letters. She remembered Jimmy giving it to Mark. She took the _Iliad_ from its place and turned over the torn, discoloured pages. Her mother looked up, annoyed and uneasy, like a child disturbed in the possession of its toys.