It was beautiful to see and hear.
I was still holding the duchess's hand, and felt the warmth of it
through her glove; it stole up my arm like a magnetic current. I was in
Elysium; a heavenly sense had come over me that at last my periphery had
been victoriously invaded by a spirit other than mine--a most powerful
and beneficent spirit. There was a blessed fault in my impenetrable
armor of self, after all, and the genius of strength and charity and
loving-kindness had found it out.
"Now you're dreaming true," she said. "Where are those boys going?"
"To church, to make their _premiere communion_," I replied.
"That's right. You're dreaming true because I've got you by the hand. Do
you know that tune?"
I listened, and the words belonging to it came out of the past and I
said them to her, and she laughed again, with her eyes screwed up
deliciously.
"Quite right--quite!" she exclaimed. "How odd that you should know them!
How well you pronounce French for an Englishman! For you are Mr.
Ibbetson, Lady Cray's architect?"
I assented, and she let go my hand.
The street was full of people--familiar forms and faces and voices,
chatting together and looking down the road after the yellow omnibus;
old attitudes, old tricks of gait and manner, old forgotten French ways
of speech--all as it was long ago.
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