So it is a robin that has gone to housekeeping there in the close-cut banksia. He is a devoted mate; he knows by heart, perhaps by experience, how necessary it is to encourage, dull little wives on the nest; and, neglectful of the hard-beating storm, he perches as near her as may be and sends out every dulcet variation he can think of. To the prisoner in the house it seems a supreme note of hope, this bird singing in the rain. CHAPTER XV I find it desirable to sit more and more out in the rain. A little stouter protection, a little more determination, and the cane chair will soon weather anything. There are still tempestuous half-hours which drive me as far as the verandah, but I am growing every day more used to the steady beat and drip about my defences, and I now know precisely the term of resistance of every umbrella in the house. One after the other I put them to the proof; on a really wet day I discourage three or four. An occasional pelting of my person does not trouble me, I am very water-proof; but when drops descend upon this fair page and confuse its sentiments I call loudly for another umbrella. Constantly, no doubt, the cane chair under the conifer grows a stranger spectacle; but my family have become accustomed to it and there is no one else to see. The occasional rickshaw that passes along the road above pays attention to nothing, but goes as fast as it can, with the hood up, like a deranged beetle, and if any one rides past it is with bent head and flying mackintosh. I have the world very much to myself, most of the mountains when I can see them, and all the garden. And it is full of rewards and satisfactions, this rainy world. The wind that pushes the clouds up here blows over a thousand miles of sun and sand and draws a balm from the desert to mingle with its cool dampness, delicious to breathe, like a cooled drink to the lungs. It cannot be tasted in the house because of the prevailing flavour of carpets and curtains. Nor can anybody know, who has not sat out under it, the delight of the slow termination of a shower, the spacing lines and the sparser drop-dancers on the gravel, the jolly irregular drip from the branches on your umbrella, the wraiths of mist skimming over the drive and the feint thin veil slanting against the deodars into which it all dissolves. So invariably we are careful to wait in the house “until it is over,”--quite over. A pencil-cedar too, very wet, with a drop at the end of every spine, and a soft gray light shining through it, is a good thing to look up into. “As if it were candied,” as Thisbe politely conceded, and departed at once into the house out of the damp.