English inns in those days
charged the unexpected, and I asked what our lunch was to cost.

"Pay or not," she said, "and what you like. It's holiday these days.
I suppose we'll still have paying and charging, however we manage
it, but it won't be the worry it has been--that I feel sure. It's
the part I never had no fancy for. Many a time I peeped through the
bushes worrying to think what was just and right to me and mine,
and what would send 'em away satisfied. It isn't the money I care
for. There'll be mighty changes, be sure of that; but here I'll
stay, and make people happy--them that go by on the roads. It's a
pleasant place here when people are merry; it's only when they're
jealous, or mean, or tired, or eat up beyond any stomach's digesting, or
when they got the drink in 'em that Satan comes into this garden.
Many's the happy face I've seen here, and many that come again
like friends, but nothing to equal what's going to be, now things
are being set right."

She smiled, that bounteous woman, with the joy of life and hope.
"You shall have an omelet," she said, "you and your friends; such
an omelet--like they'll have 'em in heaven! I feel there's cooking
in me these days like I've never cooked before. I'm rejoiced
to have it to do. . . ."

It was just then that Nettie and Verrall appeared under a rustic
archway of crimson roses that led out from the inn. Nettie wore
white and a sun-hat, and Verrall was a figure of gray. "Here
are my friends," I said; but for all the magic of the Change,
something passed athwart the sunlight in my soul like the passing
of the shadow of a cloud. "A pretty couple," said the landlady,
as they crossed the velvet green toward us. . . .

They were indeed a pretty couple, but that did not greatly gladden
me. No--I winced a little at that.

Section 3

This old newspaper, this first reissue of the New Paper,
dessicated last relic of a vanished age, is like the little piece
of identification the superstitious of the old days--those queer
religionists who brought a certain black-clad Mrs. Piper to the
help of Christ--used to put into the hand of a clairvoyant. At
the crisp touch of it I look across a gulf of fifty years and see
again the three of us sitting about that table in the arbor, and I
smell again the smell of the sweet-briar that filled the air about
us, and hear in our long pauses the abundant murmuring of bees
among the heliotrope of the borders.

It is the dawn of th