"There was no sound at all within the room. But ... he saw a woman's face.
"He saw it quite clearly for perhaps five seconds, the face rising white from the white column of the throat, the dark and weighty coronal of the hair, the curved lips which alone had any colour, the eyes, deep and troubled, which seemed to hint a prayer for help which they disdained to make—for five seconds, perhaps, the illusion remained, for five seconds the face looked out at him ... lit palely, as it seemed, by its own pallor, and so vanished."
A.E.W. Mason: "Miranda of the Balcony."
Neither by inclination nor habit am I more blasphemous or foul-mouthed than my neighbour, but I should not relish being ordered a year in Purgatory for every occasion on which I repeated "Damn you, Seraph!" in the course of the following nineteen or twenty hours.
It was nearly midnight when we left Adelphi Terrace, and I had in my own mind fixed one hour as the maximum duration of my patience or willingness to humour a demented neurotic. Thirty minutes out, thirty minutes back, and then the Seraph would go to bed, if I had to keep him covered with my revolver. En parenthèse, I wish I could break myself of the habit of carrying loaded firearms by night. In the settled, orderly Old Countries it is unnecessary; in the West it is merely foolish. I should be the richer by the contents of six chambers before I had time to draw on the quick, resourceful child of a Western State.... Nevertheless, my revolver and I are inseparable.
We started down the Strand, along the Mall, past Buckingham Palace, and through Eaton Square to the Cadogan Estate. This was what I ought to have expected, if I had had time to sort out my expectations. The Seraph stood for a few minutes looking up at the Rodens' slumbering house, and then walked slowly eastward into Sloane Street.
"Shall we go back now?" I suggested, in the voice one uses to deceive a child.
"I'm not mad, Toby," he answered, like a boy repeating a lesson. "I must find Sylvia."
He wandered into Knightsbridge, hesitated, and then set out at an uncertain three miles an hour along the border of the park towards Kensington. I realized with a sinking heart that he was heading for Chiswick.
"Better leave it till the morning, Seraph," I urged, with a hand on his shoulder. "She'll be in bed, and we mustn't disturb her."