Said the emptiness that was left to her: "Greater than all you ever sang, May, is a song at a child's bed that you never sang — how you longed to sing it.
Greater than all you ever did, May... your life. Your life has been lost, and here you and I are alone."
... That was a night...
as though it had broken loose from the days and the nights and the hours.
No after and no before.
Only a night hung alone, between earth and sky... turning upon itself.
— 1 —
The dark brow against the windowpane, like a piece of glass turned to ice.
And the girl's eyes straying in the night, and the palm trees whistling a funeral whistle.
... And the girl did not turn her eyes from the night, and her lashes brimmed with tears.
And in the darkness stretched over the earth and in the sky — in her tears — there loomed before her the cemetery of strangers, beyond the palm trees, thick with phantoms. And in it the graves, shrinking and lengthening... graves of marble, and graves wiped level with the ground.
And behold, one grave among them, a new one, rises from the dust and walks in the night... creeping, creeping...
And the grave keeps creeping, bearing at its head a cross of stone, and in the cross the heads of a man and a woman... And the grave draws near the girl whose cold brow is pressed to the cold glass, and clasps her to itself with a violent clasp; and the girl gasps, and faints...
That night, "May" had buried her mother over her father's dust...
— 2 —
On the morning of the next day the girl walked through the rooms of the Cairo house, seeking her dear ones in their warm rooms, and found only the phantom of the new grave, looking in on her from behind the walls and the windows... and the two wings of a great black bat, beating her brow and her heart and flailing about her house.
And she nearly sank down and collapsed.
Why does the shadow of this fearful grave cling to her?
Death. But she had not feared it before this day.
And had she not reckoned that she must lose her parents at some hour of time?
Then why?
She did not know...
And she went on pacing to and fro like a phantom creeping, while the deep darkness wound her round and round.
And suddenly her mind lit up...
The one beyond the sea.
The one who lives in colors and melodies, in love and tenderness — could he not be to her a mother and a father and a brother and a son...?
Why not? He understands her, and in his understanding of her is a sweetness she has known in no other man... in his heart is a perfume she has not known in the airs of men!
His fragrance fills her room and her book and her pen. His high forehead bends over her papers in the night...
His long black lashes drowse upon her book, and on some nights they brush the lashes of her eye!!
Why not...
She would have everything after that, and she would answer him...
She would answer him in his sickness, and be to him the mother and the sister and the wife...
And her heart shone... why not??
And the girl bent, in her deep grief, writing to that
