Jim has watched the daily progress of the plane-leaves from the low
window of No. 12's _entresol_. The daily progress? Is it possible that
he has been there every day during the past week? He asks himself this,
with a species of shock; and it is with a sense of relief that he finds
that one whole day has intervened, during which he had not heard the
sound of the electric bell thrilling through the apartment under the
touch of his own fingers. What can have taken him there, every day but
one? He runs over, in his mind, with a misgiving as to their
insufficiency, the reasons of his visit. For the first he had had an
excellent excuse. Surely it would have been barbarous not to have
imparted to the anxiously-watching pair the good news that the object of
their mysterious terror had really and authentically gone! On the second
day it seemed quite worth while to take the walk, in order to tell them
that he had accidentally learned the clergyman's destination to be
Venice, and his intention to return _viâ_ Milan and the St. Gothard. On
the third day, being as near to them as San Annunziata, it had seemed
unfriendly not to inquire after Mrs. Le Marchant's neuralgia. On the
fourth----He is pulled up short in his reminiscences. Why had he gone on
the fourth day? He can give no answer to the question, and slides off
from it to another. Which was the fourth day? Was it--yes, it was the
one on which the wind blew as coldly east as it might have done across
Salisbury Plain's naked expanse, and he had found Elizabeth sitting on a
milking-stool shivering over a poor little fire of green wood, and
blowing it with a pair of bellows. He had helped her to blow, and
between them they had blown the fire entirely away, as often happens in
the case of unskilled handlers of bellows, and Elizabeth had laughed
till she cried.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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