attest that his eternity had lasted something near a quarter of
an hour.

"And I had professed myself a Kantian, and made light of the
objective reality of Time! thou laggard, Time!" he cried, and
shook his fist at Space, Time's unoffending consort.

"I believe it will never be four o'clock again," he said, in
despair, finally; and once more had out his watch. It was
half-past three. He scowled at the instrument's bland white
face. "You have no bowels, no sensibilities--nothing but dry
little methodical jog-trot wheels and pivots!" he exclaimed,
flying to insult for relief. "You're as inhuman as a French
functionary. Do you call yourself a sympathetic comrade for an
impatient man?" He laid it open on his rustic table, and waited
through a last eternity. At a quarter to four he crossed the
river. "If I am early--tant pis!" he decided, choosing the
lesser of two evils, and challenging Fate.

He crossed the river, and stood for the first time in the
grounds of Ventirose--stood where she had been in the habit of
standing, during their water-side colloquies. He glanced back
at his house and garden, envisaging them for the first time, as
it were, from her point of view. They had a queer air of
belonging to an era that had passed, to a yesterday already
remote. They looked, somehow, curiously small, moreover--the
garden circumscribed, the two-storied house, with its striped
sunblinds, poor and petty. He turned his back upon them--left
them behind. He would have to come home to them later in the
day, to be sure; but then everything would be different. A