sed--nearly a week. Chip spent much of his time in the
Kleine Schanze, noticing that the distinguished stranger frequented it
less. Idleness would have got on his nerves, and Berne begun to bore
him, had it not been for the knowledge that he was under the same roof
with Edith. That gave him patience. It was the kind of comfort a man or
a woman finds in being near the prison where some loved one is shut up
in a cell.

It was again an afternoon when the shining spiritual presences were
making themselves visible--not with the gleaming suddenness with which
they had appeared ten days before, but slowly, with vague wonders, as if
finding it hard to bring themselves within mortal ken. Rounding the
corner of the promenade at the end remote from the hotel, at a point
from which he had the whole line of the bluff and the green depths of
the valley and the slopes of the Gurten and the curtain of Alpine mist
in one superb _coup d'oeil_, Chip saw a great white shoulder baring
itself luminously in the eastern sky. For long minutes that was all. It
might have been one of the gates of pearl of which he had heard tell.

It was the sort of thing from which no earth-dweller could take his
eyes. He stood leaning on his stick, his cigar smoldering in his left
hand. He couldn't see that the clouds lifted or that the mists rolled
away; he only grew aware that what seemed like a gate became a bastion,
and what seemed like a bastion rose into a tower, and that out of the
tower and in the midst of the tower and round about the tower white
pinnacles glistened in white air. Nothing had happened that he could
define, beyond a heightening of his own capacity to see. Nothing on that
horizon seemed to emerge or to recede: looking wrought the wonder; he
either saw or he didn't see; and just now he saw. He thought of
something he had heard or read--he had forgotten where: "Immediately
there fell from his eyes as it had been scales." That, apparently, was
the process, while the spiritual presences ranged themselves slowly
within his vision--row upon row, peak upon peak, dome upon dome,
serried, ghostly--white against a white sky, white in white air.

He withdrew his gaze only because the people, ever eager for this
spectacle which they had seen all their lives, crowded to the parapet.
As the children were still in school, it was a quiet throng, elderly and
sedate. Leaning on the balustrade, all faces turned one way, they
fringed the promenade, leaving