She smiled, that bounteous woman, with the joy of life and hope. “You shall have an omelet,” she said, “you and your friends; such an omelet—like they’ll have ‘em in heaven! I feel there’s cooking in me these days like I’ve never cooked before. I’m rejoiced to have it to do. . . .” It was just then that Nettie and Verrall appeared under a rustic archway of crimson roses that led out from the inn. Nettie wore white and a sun-hat, and Verrall was a figure of gray. “Here are my friends,” I said; but for all the 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 toward us. . . . They were indeed a pretty couple, but that did not greatly gladden me. No—I winced a little at that. § 3 This old newspaper, this first reissue of the _New Paper_, desiccated last relic of a vanished age, is like the little piece of identification 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 arbor, and I smell again the smell of the sweet-briar 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 bear, all three of us, 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 sits cornerwise to me, better grown, better dressed, fair and quiet, two years my senior indeed, but looking no older than I because of his light complexion; and opposite me is Nettie, with dark eyes upon my face, graver and more beautiful than I had ever seen her in the former time. Her dress is still that white one she had worn when I came upon her in the park, and still about her dainty neck she wears her string of pearls and that little coin of gold. She is so much the same, she is so changed; a girl then and now a woman—and all my agony and all the marvel of the Change between! Over the end of the green table about which we sit, a spotless cloth is spread, it bears a pleasant lunch spread out with a simple equipage. Behind me is the liberal sunshine of the green and various garden. I see it all. Again I sit there, eating awkwardly, this paper lies upon the table and Verrall talks of the Change. “You can’t imagine,” he says in his sure, fine accents, “how much the Change has destroyed of me. I still don’t feel awake. Men of my sort are so tremendously _made;_ I never suspected it before.”