a more comfortable position. “Poor devil!” he said, as he drew the tattered clothes closer about the Prince’s breast.
Sonorous and startling came the stroke of 9 from the clock tower. The young man sighed again, turned his face for one last look at the house of his relinquished hopes—and cried aloud profane words of holy rapture.
From the middle upper window blossomed in the dusk a waving, snowy, fluttering, wonderful, divine emblem of forgiveness and promised joy.
By came a citizen, rotund, comfortable, home-hurrying, unknowing of the delights of waving silken scarfs on the borders of dimly-lit parks.
“Will you oblige me with the time, sir?” asked the young man; and the citizen, shrewdly conjecturing his watch to be safe, dragged it out and announced:
“Twenty-nine and a half minutes past eight, sir.”
And then, from habit, he glanced at the clock in the tower, and made further oration.
“By George! that clock’s half an hour fast! First time in ten years I’ve known it to be off. This watch of mine never varies a———”
But the citizen was talking to vacancy. He turned and saw his hearer, a fast receding black shadow,
[194]
