And yet on the next Sunday morning, face to face with him again at the
Land’s End, what she very soon came to was: “As if I believed you didn’t
_know_ by what cord you hold me!” Absolutely too, and just that morning
in fact, above all, he wouldn’t, he quite couldn’t have taken his solemn
oath that he hadn’t a sneaking remnant, as he might have put it to
himself--a remnant of faith in tremendous things still to come of their
interview. The day was sunny and breezy, the sea of a cold purple; he
wouldn’t go to church as he mostly went of Sunday mornings, that being
in its way too a social relation--and not least when two-and-thruppenny
tan-coloured gloves were new; which indeed he had the art of keeping
them for ages. Yet he would dress himself as he scarce mustered
resources for even to figure on the fringe of Society, local and
transient, at St. Bernard’s, and in this trim he took his way westward;
occupied largely, as he went, it might have seemed to any person
pursuing the same course and happening to observe him, in a fascinated
study of the motions of his shadow, the more or less grotesque shape
projected, in front of him and mostly a bit to the right, over the
blanched asphalt of the Parade and dandling and dancing at such a rate,
shooting out and then contracting, that, viewed in themselves, its
eccentricities might have formed the basis of an interesting challenge:
“Find the state of mind, guess the nature of the agitation, possessing
the person so remarkably represented!” Herbert Dodd, for that matter,
might have been himself attempting to make by the sun’s sharp aid some
approach to his immediate horoscope.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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