higher, between the watching faces and the envious sounds—away up to the daïs and the throne. The article was a date; he had taken rank; at a bound—waked up a national glory. A national glory was needed, and it was an immense convenience he was there. What all this meant rolled over me, and I fear I grew a little faint—it meant so much more than I could say "yea" to on the spot. In a flash, somehow, all was different; the tremendous wave I speak of had swept something away. It had knocked down, I suppose, my little customary altar, my twinkling tapers and my flowers, and had reared itself into the likeness of a temple vast and bare. When Neil Paraday should come out of the house he would come out a contemporary. That was what had happened—the poor man was to be squeezed into his horrible age. I felt as if he had been overtaken on the crest of the hill and brought back to the city. A little more and he would have dipped down to posterity and escaped.
IV
When he came out it was exactly as if he had been in custody, for beside him walked a stout man with a big black beard, who, save that he wore spectacles, might have been a policeman, and in whom at a second glance I recognised the highest contemporary enterprise.
"This is Mr. Morrow" said Paraday, looking, I thought, rather white; "he wants to publish heaven knows what about me."
I winced as I remembered that this was exactly what I myself had wanted. "Already?" I exclaimed, with a sort of sense that my friend had fled to me for protection.
