Page:Adams - A Child of the Age.djvu/56

44 while the gentle scene went by. Faint unreality was with me and something dreamy.

'Altogether,' I said to myself, sitting in the engine-side corner of the waiting train with my hand in my cheek and my elbow in the window-ledge, 'to-day has been a day of dreamy changes: one unlike any one I know, save perhaps three or four of my fever days.' What I remember next was looking forth at Seabay on a long board we were passing. Then we stopped. I put my hand out of the door; turned the handle; shoved open the door with my knee; and got out. It was a hot late-afternoon, though a gentle sea-breeze was blowing. The sky was full of rare colours. A porter pulled my box out of the luggage van and landed it, over the stone border, on the brick-red gravel. I stood by the box and the train went on and away: stood for some little, reflecting that I had forgotten Mr. Cholmeley's address and had neither his letter nor Colonel James's to refer to. It didn't trouble me. I stood still, thinking about things in a vague way. Then took to looking at the station and a tall grass bank opposite. There seemed no one in the station now. A hen fluttered out of some furze a little farther on into the line. Some ducks came paddling their bills along in a broad rut on the other side of it. I could hear a telegraph clock tick-tick-tick-ticking.

As my slow gaze went to the doorway and a small book-stall towards the other end of my side of the station, an old gentleman's head, bent shoulders, and black-clothed body came from just past the book-stall. He had a white stock round his neck. And then, between him and the book-stall, stepped a fair young girl.—They came on slowly along the brick-red gravel.

I observed them with a new feeling: them, neither the old gentleman particularly nor the girl. All at once, he stopped. Then she stopped. He said:

'My dear, I don't see him.'

The girl raised her head, and looked towards me. Our eyes met. Every-thing in me stood still, effortlessly though. Then she looked down to him: lifted her hand to his arm, and said in a low tone: