As though her beauty had just begun!
London, that mighty sob, that splendid tear,
That jewel hanging in the great world’s ear.
“Ah! of your beauty change no single grace,
My London with your sad mysterious face.”
He moved forward in a strange rapture of spirit. He forgot even “beautiful London”; he was momentarily unconscious how he travelled or whither. He might have been blind or deaf for all that he now saw or heard. The drone of a blind beggar’s voice reading the Scriptures, however, presently had power to break his trance. He paused a moment before the man.
“This same Jesus,” droned the blind man’s voice, “who is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen Him go.”
Hammond dropped a sixpence into the beggar’s box, and moved away, the wonder of the words he had just heard read arresting all his previous thoughts of his glad success.
“Shall so come in like manner!” he murmured. “I wonder what it means?”
The next instant a woman’s pitiful voice filled his ear, crying: