Project Gutenberg's A Modern Chronicle, Volume 7, by Winston Churchill

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Title: A Modern Chronicle, Volume 7

Author: Winston Churchill

Release Date: October 19, 2004 [EBook #5380]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A MODERN CHRONICLE, VOLUME 7 ***

Produced by David Widger

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.

Yet, though his own impatient spirit had fared forth to meet her with
this premature gift of his attributes, she had to fight the growing fear
within her. Now that the days of suffering were as they had not been,
insistent questions dinned in her ears: was she entitled to the joys to
come? What had she done to earn them? Had hers not been an attempt, on a
gigantic scale, to cheat the fates? Nor could she say whether this
feeling were a wholly natural failure to grasp a future too big, or the
old sense of the unreality of events that had followed her so
persistently.

The Hudson disappeared. Factories, bridges, beflagged week-end resorts,
ramshackle houses, and blocks of new buildings were scattered here and
there. The train was running