But this was not hearing. It was seeing. We all saw. Jennie saw.
As the hues of a coloured top alter at a touch of the finger, so change began to succeed change over that face with its back to the morning light.
Oh, by no means violent ones at first. Quite gentle ones. We merely saw the youth who had painted a few pictures, the young man who had swum the Channel, the athlete who had discussed tides and currents with boatmen in the Lord Warden at Dover——
Then a certain acceleration (though you must understand that this fantasia on Time that we watched is but comparative, happened in a few instants, more quickly than I can write or you read). Against the sun a glint of golden beard appeared and was gone in a twink. I had once seen that beard at breakfast-time, in a South Kensington mews.
But oh my heart! Then a terrific leap!... His whole form bulked, loomed. Eleven years descended on him like a Nasmyth hammer. He seemed to take the very brain out of my head and to put it, not in France at all, but into a house in Surrey with a pond in front of it, while he, with a punt-pole in his hand, brought a piece of water-starwort into Julia Oliphant's hand——
His arm, both his arms, were over his face as he tried to hide it all from her. No cry broke from him now. But her arms were locked desperately about his waist. She would never let him go.
Then somewhere a dog yapped, and at the sound the horrible life-slide ceased. It ceased because it could not go further. How could it go further than that side-street off Piccadilly in which the woman who had written The Parthian Arrow had set a dog upon the author of An Ape in Hell? Already I had started forward, but my foot caught in the scrub, and I found myself rolling, clutching wildly in the air for something to hold.
But I swear it was for them and not for myself that I feared.
Then, as they slowly swayed outward together by the mountain-ash, the beautiful, re-transfiguring thing happened.
A stupid woman with a wretched little pet dog! A rebuff on a pavement over a miserable literary squabble! Was it for this that the years had changed on his face as the hues change on a spinning top? Was that all that this commonplace apparition of a woman had reminded him of? Why, he had thought it had been something important, something to do with the peace of churches, the beauty of coloured windows, the glorious thunder-roll from the organ! He had thought it had something to do with his boyhood's dreams, aspirations, vows! But only this!... It was not worth the trouble of having sought it. He had better get back to his deliverance.