Page:In the days of the comet.djvu/283

 ne. Near me, and for the time clean forgotten by me, Verrall and Nettie woke--woke near one another; each heard before all other sounds the other's voice amidst the stillness and the light. And the scattered people who had run to and fro, and fallen on the beach of Bungalow village, awoke; the sleeping villagers of Menton started, and sat up in that unwonted freshness and newness; the contorted figures in the garden, with the hymn still upon their lips, stirred amidst the flowers, and touched each other timidly, and thought of Paradise. My mother found herself crouched against the bed, and rose--rose with a glad invisible conviction of accepted prayer. . ..

Already, when it came to us, the soldiers, crowded between the lines of dusty poplars along the road to Allarmont, were chatting and sharing coffee with the French riflemen, who had hailed them from their carefully hidden pits among the vineyards up the slopes of Beauville. A certain perplexity had come to these marksmen, who had dropped asleep tensely ready for the rocket that should wake the whir and rattle of their magazines. At the sight and sound of the stir and human confusion in the roadway below, it had come to each an individually that he could not shoot. One conscript, at least, has told his story of his awakening, and how curious he thought the rifle there beside him in