He responded in a gentle pressure of her hand. Together they stared into the crystal sphere they jointly held. Minute after minute passed in silence, in a pervading sense of intimate communion where their pulse-beats, in the contact of their hands, regulated themselves to an identical rhythm.
“I see nothing,” he murmured, vaguely disappointed, “nothing at all.”
“Patience!” she breathed, intent on the crystal, but sparing him a little squeeze of the fingers in recognition of his presence. “Look!—keep on looking!”
Again there was silence. The ticking of the clock upon the mantelpiece became almost hypnotic in its monotony. The fire dulled down, its light no longer reflected in leaping flashes in the crystal.
“Look!” she whispered. “It’s clouding over—going milky! Do you see?”
He nodded assent, unwilling to break the spell by speech, mysteriously awed as he, too, saw a milky cloud suffuse the depths of the crystal. Holding their breath, they waited, closely linked, for they knew not what of vision.
As they stared into it, almost unconscious now of their own bodies, of the muscular effort that held the crystal globe in unvarying focus from their eyes, they saw the cloud break and clear in a widening rift that seemed to open into infinity.
“Look!” she murmured. “It’s coming!—Look—People!—crowds of them—running and jostling each other! Look, it’s a fête of some sort—a lot of them have cockades! Do you see?”
In fact, the depths of the crystal were suddenly inhabited. A throng of tiny figures, men and women, surged, broke up, flocked together again in high excitement, arms waving in the air. Over their heads other figures leaned out from the upper windows of a row of more distant houses—evidently the scene was a public square—and waved also in diminutive enthusiasm. Their costumes seemed like fancy dress—men in long, bright-coloured coats with enormous lapels and tight-fitting trousers with broad stripes of some contrasting colour—women in high-waisted dresses and poke bonnets or no bonnets at all—men and women, and these the greater number, the dominant majority of the crowd, in the nondescript vestments of squalid, ugly poverty. The better-dressed men and women wore prominently, all of them, a cockade or rosette of red, white, and blue.