"Oho, oho? You think that?"
A wild thought flashed across Romarin's brain.
"You mean—?"
"I mean?… Oho, oho! Yes, I mean! She did, Romarin…."
The mirrors, mistily seen through the smoke of half a hundred cigars and cigarettes, the Loves and Shepherdesses of the garish walls, the diners starting up in their places, all suddenly seemed to swing round in a great half-circle before Romarin's eyes. The next moment, feeling as if he stood on something on which he found it difficult to keep his balance, he had caught up the table-knife with which he had peeled the pear and had struck at the side of Marsden's neck. The rounded blade snapped, but he struck again with the broken edge, and left the knife where it entered. The table appeared uptilted almost vertical; over it Marsden's head disappeared; it was followed by a shower of glass, cigars, artificial flowers and the tablecloth at which he clutched; and the dirty American cloth of the table top was left bare.
* * * * *
But the edge behind which Marsden's face had disappeared remained vertical. A group of scene-shifters were moving a flat of scenery from a theatre into a tumbril-like cart…
And Romarin knew that, past, present, and future, he had seen it all in an instant, and that Marsden stood behind that painted wing.
And he knew, too, that he had only to wait until that flat passed and to take Marsden's arm and enter the restaurant, and it would be so. A drowning man is said to see all in one unmeasurable instant of time; a year-long dream is but, they say, an instantaneous arrangement in the moment of waking of the molecules we associate with ideas; and the past of history and the future of prophecy are folded up in the mystic moment we call the present….
It would come true….