Dr. Vermont's fantasy, and other stories

All rights reserved
DR. VERMONT’S FANTASY
HANNAH LYNCH
LONDON J. M. DENT AND COMPANY BOSTON: LAMSON WOLFFE & CO.
MDCCCXCVI
Edinburgh: T. and A. C ONSTABLE , Printers to Her Majesty
T HREE of these stories—‘Armand’s Mistake,’ ‘A Page of Philosophy,’ and ‘The Little Marquis’ have already appeared in Macmillan’s Magazine , and I am indebted to Messrs. Macmillan for the kind permission to republish them.
To Frederick Greenwood
( Told by the traveller )
I T was a warm autumn that year—a luminous exception upon which the last summer of the century was borne somewhat oppressively to the very verge of winter. The middle hours of the afternoon could be intolerable enough in a big, busy city well upon the confines of the South. The rush and whirr of looms was carried far upon the air, and even into the quietest streets wandered the noisy echoes of the boulevards.
Yet it was dull and flat for the solitary stranger, without interest in factories, or provincial entertainment in friendship. It was doubly dull for a woman past youth and all its personal excitements to be extracted from fleeting curiosity and thrills of anticipation; denied by reason of sex the stale delights of café lounges, and by reason of station the healthier and livelier hospitalities of cabaret and peasant reunions.
Travelling-bag and portmanteau lay strapped in the hotel hall. The train for Paris would not leave until late that night, and to while away the intervening hours I went forth beyond the town. I chose the farther end of the long boulevard, the middle of which I had not yet passed. Down there the brilliant air lost its clearness in a yellow mist, as if flung from the sky in a fine dust of powdered gold. Upon its edge hung the last visible arms of the trees on either side, lucidly, of unwonted greenness, the green we note in painted French landscapes, brightly touched with yellow. I felt that something fresh, cool, and soft must lie behind that golden veil. It led my imagination as a child is led out of the real, by the illusive promises of fairyland.