A MODERN CHRONICLE

By Winston Churchill

Volume 7.



CHAPTER XI

IN WHICH IT IS ALL DONE OVER AGAIN

All morning she had gazed on the shining reaches of the Hudson, their
colour deepening to blue as she neared the sea. A gold-bound volume of
Shelley, with his name on the fly-leaf, lay in her lap. And two lines she
repeated softly to herself--two lines that held a vision:

"He was as the sun in his fierce youth,
As terrible and lovely as a tempest;"

She summoned him out of the chaos of the past, and the past became the
present, and he stood before her as though in the flesh. Nay, she heard
his voice, his laugh, she even recognized again the smouldering flames in
his eyes as he glanced into hers, and his characteristic manners and
gestures. Honora wondered. In vain, during those long months of exile had
she tried to reconstruct him thus the vision in its entirety would not
come: rare, fleeting, partial, and tantalizing glimpses she had been
vouchsafed, it is true. The whole of him had been withheld until this
breathless hour before the dawn of her happiness.