that made it all the easier for me to imagine that I was going to
discover a new world.'

Darnell paused in the stream of his talk. He looked keenly at his wife
to see if he were wearying her, but her eyes gazed at him with unabated
interest--one would have almost said that they were the eyes of one who
longed and half expected to be initiated into the mysteries, who knew
not what great wonder was to be revealed. She sat with her back to the
open window, framed in the sweet dusk of the night, as if a painter had
made a curtain of heavy velvet behind her; and the work that she had
been doing had fallen to the floor. She supported her head with her two
hands placed on each side of her brow, and her eyes were as the wells in
the wood of which Darnell dreamed in the night-time and in the day.

'And all the strange tales I had ever heard were in my head that
morning,' he went on, as if continuing the thoughts that had filled his
mind while his lips were silent. 'I had gone to bed early, as I told
you, to get a thorough rest, and I had set my alarum clock to wake me
at three, so that I might set out at an hour that was quite strange for
the beginning of a journey. There was a hush in the world when I awoke,
before the clock had rung to arouse me, and then a bird began to sing
and twitter in the elm tree that grew in the next garden, and I looked
out of the window, and everything was still, and the morning air
breathed in pure and sweet, as I had never known it before. My room was
at the back of the house, and most of the gardens had trees in them, and
beyond these trees I could see the backs of the houses of the next
street rising like the wall of an old city; and as I looked the sun
rose, and the great light came in at my window, and the day began.

'And I found that when I was once out of the streets just about me that
I knew, some of the queer feeling that had come to me two days before
came back again. It was not nearly so strong, the streets no longer
smelt of incense, but still there was enough of it to show me what a
strange world I passed by. There were things that one may see again and
again in many London streets: a vine or a fig tree on a wall, a lark
singing in a cage, a curious shrub blossoming in a garden, an odd shape
of a roof, or a balcony with an uncommon-looking trellis-work in iron.
There's scarcely a street, perhaps, where you won't see one or other of
such things as these; but that morning they rose to