world, no mystery brooded with black or golden wings. They would circle unsurprised until for each one came the surprise of death. It was all they had. They were dreadful to contemplate because they suggested only death, unpondered death. Her eye rested for relief upon a barefooted newspaper boy running freely about with his cry, darting head down towards a shouted challenge.
“Before you go,” Mr. Shatov was saying. She turned towards his suddenly changed voice, saw his pale face, grave, and working with the determination to difficult speech; saw him, while she stood listening to the few tense phrases in painful admiration of his courage, horribly transformed, by the images he evoked far away, immovable in the sunshine of his earlier days. The very trembling of his voice had attested the agonising power of his communication. Yet behind it all, with what a calmness of his inner mind, had he told her, now, only now, when they were set in the bright amber of so many days, that he had