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The waves of sorrow are the waters which shall lap us close, he silently recited, framing the thought for poetry, discarding it, giving the image other words. This flood tide of tears upon which we sail.

Better, but not right, though it would be easy to find a rhyme for “sail.”Too easy, perhaps.What if he broke the line after “tears”? Two good rhymes, then, building toward an alternating rhyme scheme.Yet he must take care.Would the lines then be too short, too choppy? The difference between doggerel and true poetry could be as narrow as the cadence given when the poem was read aloud. The poet must be in control of all possible readings.

Seeing Maud completely engaged with Russell,Willie made a surreptitious note of the potential line on his shirt cuff.He could not work at poetry just then, even though his finest inspiration was before him, her slender height bending over the teacup cradled in her hand, her voice—a voice he had so frequently heard raised in exhortation—sweet and mellow.

Maud was quizzing Russell about reincarnation, and that good man, so knowledgeable about things on the other side of the veil, was reassuring her that a child who died young was frequently reborn, often into the same family.

Willie opened his mouth, about to express his skepticism regarding reincarnation. Even if reincarnation did exist—and the matter was one open to ample speculation—would a child be reborn to its birth mother or simply into the same family? How might one recognize such a reborn child? Russell had said a child might be reborn “soon,”but what was“soon”t o a spirit freed of physical referents?

Yet even as Willie shaped the words he would speak so readily in one of the discussions that followed meetings of the Golden Dawn or the Theosophical Society, he realized the pain they would bring Maud were he to speak them aloud.Willie knew that Maud was not questioning Russell at random. She was thinking of the little French child, Georgette, whom she had adopted and who had recently died in France.

Maud had been at Georgette’s sickbed, and when the death bird had tapped on the windowpane Maud had sent for doctor after doctor, striving to the end against the death her inner eye had told her must come. Shouldn’t Willie permit this woman he adored whatever slim comfort Russell’s mystic wisdom might bring her?

Yet,Willie admitted honestly to himself, there was a part of him that envied any—even a dead child—who had so held Maud’s love. Would Maud mourn him so extravagantly? Hadn’t she refused his proposal of marriage not long before her latest departure for France?

While she had been away,Willie had teased himself with fantasies that she had fled the intensity of her feelings for him, that she had left rather than admit she had been wrong to refuse his proposal, that she would return and confide in him her love and her fear. It was a deflation of his hopes to discover she had gone instead to this child’s deathbed.

MAUD

Maud was aware, acutely aware, ofWillie listening to George Russell’s expostulation on reincarnation.

Willie was unwontedly quiet, by which sign she knew he was brooding. When nervous, dear Willie chattered. He also chattered when he was happy or engaged with an idea. The only times he was silent were when he was composing—and even then he drummed his fingers on the table, trying out meter and rhythm—or when he was unhappy.

When Russell departed, promising to send several books and articles on reincarnation around to her rooms,Willie maintained his brooding silence.

Although Maud herself was so weighed down with misery that she hardly knew herself (George, my dear baby, how could I have left you?) she strove to find some item of interest with which she might distract her friend—as means to draw him from himself and back into the world they shared.

Once before Maud had offered Willie a fragment from one of her dreams. In that dream they had been brother and sister in the Arabian desert, sold together into slavery. Now she began to tell him of another dream image that haunted her, remembering too late