“How extraordinary of him! What time is it? Quarter to nine! Why didn’t he go when he was warm? I must go and see him, I suppose.”
“He says he’s lame,” said the housekeeper censoriously and loudly.
“Lame! That’s extraordinary. He certainly wasn’t last night. But don’t shout. I can hear quite well.”
“Is Mr. Marchbanks coming in to breakfast, Miss James?” said the housekeeper, more and more censorious.
“I couldn’t say. But I’ll come down as soon as mine is ready. I’ll be down in a minute, anyhow, to see the policeman. Extraordinary that he is still here.”
She sat down before her window, in the sun, to think a while. She could see the snow outside, the bare, purplish trees. The air all seemed rare and different. Suddenly the world had become quite different, as if some skin or integument had broken, as if the old, moldering London sky had crackled and rolled back, like an old skin, shriveled, leaving an absolutely new blue heaven.
“It really is extraordinary!” she said to herself. “I certainly saw that man’s face. What a wonderful face it was!
“I shall never forget it. Such laughter! He laughs longest who laughs last. He certainly will have the last laugh. I like him for that: he will laugh last. Must be some one really extraordinary! How very nice to be the one to laugh last. He certainly will. What a wonderful being! I suppose I must call him a being. He’s not a person exactly.
“But how wonderful of him to come back and alter all the world immediately! Isn’t that extraordinary. I wonder if he’ll have altered Marchbanks. Of course, Marchbanks never saw him. But he heard him. Wouldn’t that do as well, I wonder! I wonder!”
She went off into a muse about Marchbanks. She and he were such friends. They had been friends like that for almost two years. Never lovers. Never that at all. But friends.