"
"Come under the porch, where the rain won't spoil your pretty silk.
That's better. Now tell away."
They sat side by side, and she began to talk. He must have been
listening for other sounds, or surely he would have been bewildered at
the very beginning of what she told.
"It's hard to remember when one was alive, but I used to be--yes,
hundreds of years ago. I lived--can't remember very well; there was a
high wall all around, and a tower and a bell that rang for prayers--and
long, long passages where we walked up and down to tell our beads.
Outside were mountains with snow caps like the heads of the sisters,
and it was cold as snow within, cold and pure as snow. I was sixteen
years old and very unhappy. We did not know how to smile; that I learnt
later and have forgotten since. There was the skull of a dead man upon
the table where we sat to eat, that we might never forget to what
favour we must come. There were no pretty rooms in that house."
"What would you call a pretty room?" he asked, for the last sentence
was the first of which he was aware.
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