Page:In the days of the comet.djvu/324

 magic of the Change, something passed athwart the sunlight in my soul like the passing of the shadow of a cloud. "A pretty couple," said the landlady, as they crossed the velvet green towards us. . ..

They were indeed a pretty couple, but that did not greatly gladden me. No--I winced a little at that.

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This old newspaper, this first reissue of the New Paper, desiccated last relic of a vanished age, is like the little piece of identification of the superstitious of the old days--those queer religionists who brought a certain black-clad Mrs. Piper to the help of Christ--used to put into the hand of a clairvoyant. At the crisp touch of it I look across a gulf of fifty years and see again the three of us sitting about that table in the arbour, and I smell again the smell of the sweet-brier that filled the air about us, and hear in our long pauses the abundant murmuring of bees among the heliotrope of the borders.

It is the dawn of the new time, but we still bear the marks and liveries of the old.

I see myself, a dark, ill-dressed youth, with the bruise Lord Redcar gave me still blue and yellow beneath my jaw; and young Verrall s