Two days later, Bill drove the car into Havana, where he joined the Howells in a luncheon party and went afterwards to the races with them. I wondered if they would not think it very strange ... under the circumstances. And then I reflected that an extra man, married or bachelor, is welcome almost anywhere. And during my brief betrothal Bill had declared himself "quite free." I didn't care, of course, where he went or with whom. It was none of my business. And it was the loneliness and the longing for things that could never be mine, which oppressed me and made me spend my sleepless afternoon siesta on a tear-damp pillow. When Bill came home that night, I harkened politely to his account of his outing, and then went early to my room. The poem which had made itself mine during my first night in Cuba was clamoring to be written. And so I wrote it, at my table under the window, conscious that no words in so unskilled a hand could set down my feeling of imprisonment and regret. Finished, I laid it in the drawer where my diary and the letters from Richard Warren were. It was a childish thing, but I had made it, and it belonged to me ... and to one other. _Nocturne_ The moonlight slips in silence through the bars, The iron bars which lend a strange romance To my wide windows, open to the stars, Which, like gold fire-flies, imprisoned, dance Caught in the dark mantilla of the Night; That flowing veil of jewelled, enchanting lace From careless, faery finger-tips flung light To veil the tropic Moon's pale, ardent face. My windows give on gardens dim, a-gleam And freshly fragrant with night-growing things, On gardens where the sleeping flowers dream Till, cradled on the errant wind's cool wings Their little souls are wafted to far lands, While all their dreams like incense, float and rise To where some garden goddess with white hands, Gems with bright dew her nurslings' sleep-kissed eyes. In shadowed groves, with brilliant moon, blood-stained, A bird is sobbing for a distant star, In golden longing for the Unattained.... While at some window, pleading, a guitar Touched by brown fingers, throbs in serenade. And still the moonbeams fling a silvern dart, Straight through my window's iron barricade.... Thus Love steals, silent, to the prisoned heart, And, smiling, with a mockery divine Slips softly to some unguessed, secret shrine, To set the Altar Fires flaming high! * * * * * I closed the drawer--spent, unsatisfied. The thing was halting and superficial. It did not seem possible that there were people who could find release in words, or peace in beauty.