Surprised at the silence, accustomed as she was to the garrulity of country neighbours, she stepped out into the piazza. A beautiful woman she, of forty years, whose fine face seemed now set in an aureole of sunbeams. The stranger took off his hat and stooped somewhat towards her; there was something familiar in the gesture, which set the wild blood throbbing at her heart-strings as though the past twenty years had been a dream.
The farm men came singing up the lane, the heavy waggons grinding slowly along in the sunshine. All this, the everyday life, was now the dream, and they, Kitty and Elihu, had met in the meadow lands of the earthly Paradise.
How much of precious joy, that leaves no pain, Lives in the simple memory of a face Once seen, and only for a little space, And never after to be seen again: A face as fair as, on an altar pane, A pictured window in some holy place-- The glowing lineaments of immortal grace, In many a vague ideal sought in vain. Such face was yours, and such the joy to me, Who saw you once, once only, and by chance, And cherished evermore in memory The noble beauty of your countenance-- The poet's natural language in your looks, Sweet as the wondrous sweetness of your books.
We do not take to new ideas readily in Bishopsthorpe. Our fashions are always at least one season behind the times; it is only by a late innovation in Post Office regulations that we are now enabled to get our London papers on the day of their publication; and a craze, social or scientific, has almost been forgotten by the fashionable world before it manages to establish any kind of footing in our midst.
It therefore came upon us with more or less of a shock one morning a short time ago to find the walls of our sleepy little country town placarded with naming posters announcing that Professor Dmitri Sclamowsky intended to visit Bishopsthorpe on the following Friday, for the purpose of exhibiting in the Town Hall some of his marvellous powers in Thought Reading, Mesmerism, and Hypnotism.
Stray rumours from time to time, and especially of late, had visited us of strange experiments in connection with these outlandish sciences, if sciences they can be called; but we had received these with incredulity, mingled with compassion for such weak-minded persons as could be easily duped by the clever conjuring of paid charlatans.