Miriam had spent the day with Harriett. After breakfast, bounding silently up and downstairs, they visited each room in turn, chased each other about the echoing rooms and passages of the basement and all over the garden. Miriam listened speechlessly to the sound of Harriett’s heels soft on the stair carpet, ringing on the stone floors of the basement, and the swish of her skirts as she flew over the lawn following surrounding responding to Miriam’s wild tour of the garden. Miriam listened and watched, her eyes and ears eagerly gathering and hoarding visions. It could not go on. Presently some claim would be made on Harriett and she would be alone. But when they had had their fill of silently rushing about, Harriett piloted her into the drawing-room and hastily began opening the piano. A pile of duets lay on the lid. She had evidently gathered them there in readiness. Wandering about the room, shifting the familiar ornaments, flinging herself into chair after chair, Miriam watched her and saw that her strange quiet little snub face was lit and shapely. Harriett, grown-up, serene and well-dressed and going to be married in the spring, was transported by this new coming together. When they had played the last of the duets that they knew well, Harriett fumbled at the pages of a bound volume of operas in obvious uncertainty. At any moment Miriam might get up and go off and bring their sitting together on the long cretonne-covered duet stool to an end. “Come on,” roared Miriam gently, “let’s try this”; and they attacked the difficult pages. Miriam counted the metre, whispered it intoned and sang it, carrying Harriett along with shouts “go _on_, go _on_” when they had lost each other. They smashed their way along by turns playing only a single note here and there into the framework of Miriam’s desperate counting, or banging out cheerful masses of discordant tones, anything to go on driving their way together through the pages while the sunlight streamed half seen into the conservatory and the flower-filled garden crowded up against the windows, anything to come out triumphantly together at the end and to stop satisfied, the sounds of the house, so long secretly known to them both, low now around them, heard by them together, punctuating their joy. The gong sounded for lunch. “Eve,” Miriam remembered suddenly, “Eve’s coming this afternoon.” The thought set gladness thundering through her as she rose from the piano. “Let’s go for a walk after lunch,” she muttered. Harriett blushed. “Awri,” she responded tenderly. 5