“Sudden a blackbird calls.... Ah sweet! Who heeds?”
No one heeds. Attention to greybeards has made everyone insensible to blackbirds. The conclusion would develop neatly along those lines.
A year or two ago, how fervently you would have written, how complacently desired to publish that sort of thing! No regret could be quite so sickly as that with which one wished out of existence the published record of last year’s errors of taste.
‘My dear, he’s the sort of person who’d make arrangements to have his juvenilia published after his death.’
That was the sort of condemnatory label Tony and his friends would attach, spreading their hands, leaving it at that.
‘Oh, Roddy, where are you? Why do you never come?’
He flashed into mind,—leaning idly against the mantelpiece, listening with an obscure smile to Tony’s conversation.
It was the sort of evening on which anything might happen. Excitement took her suddenly by the throat and made her feeble and tingling to her finger-tips.
The last of the light fell lingeringly on the grey stone window-frame. If the gold bloom lasted till you counted fifty, it would be a good omen. One, two, three, four and so on to twenty, thirty, forty ... crushing the temptation to count faster than her own heartbeats ... forty-five ... fifty.
It was still there, vanishing softly, but with a margin of at least another twenty to spare.