Bianca looked long at the rain of moonlight falling on the earth’s carpet, like a covering shower of blossom which bees have sucked and spilled.  Then, below her, out through candescent space, she saw a shadow dart forth along the grass, and to her fright a voice rose, tremulous and clear, seeming to seek enfranchisement beyond the barrier of the dark trees:  “My brain is clouded.  Great Universe!  I cannot write!  I can no longer discover to my brothers that they are one.  I am not worthy to stay here.  Let me pass into You, and die!”

Bianca saw her father’s fragile arms stretch out into the night through the sleeves of his white garment, as though expecting to be received at once into the Universal Brotherhood of the thin air.

There ensued a moment, when, by magic, every little dissonance in all the town seemed blended into a harmony of silence, as it might be the very death of self upon the earth.

Then, breaking that trance, Mr. Stone’s voice rose again, trembling out into the night, as though blown through a reed.

“Brothers!” he said.

Behind the screen of lilac bushes at the gate Bianca saw the dark helmet of a policeman.  He stood there staring steadily in the direction of that voice.  Raising his lantern, he flashed it into every corner of the garden, searching for those who had been addressed.  Satisfied, apparently, that no one was there, he moved it to right and left, lowered it to the level of his breast, and walked slowly on.

The end.

THE PATRICIAN

By John Galsworthy

CHAPTER I

Light, entering the vast room—­a room so high that its carved ceiling refused itself to exact scrutiny—­travelled, with the wistful, cold curiosity of the dawn, over a fantastic storehouse of Time.  Light, unaccompanied by the prejudice of human eyes, made strange revelation of incongruities, as though illuminating the dispassionate march of history.

For in this dining hall—­one of the finest in England—­the Caradoc family had for centuries assembled the trophies and records of their existence.  Round about this dining hall they had built and pulled down and restored, until the rest of Monkland Court presented some aspect of homogeneity.  Here alone they had left virgin the work of the old quasi-monastic builders, and within it unconsciously deposited their souls.  For there were here, meeting the eyes of light, all those rather touching evidences of man’s desire to persist for ever, those shells of his former bodies, the fetishes and queer proofs of his faiths, together with the remorseless demonstration of their treatment at the hands of Time.

The annalist might here have found all his needed confirmations; the analyst from this material formed the due equation of high birth; the philosopher traced the course of aristocracy, from its primeval rise in crude strength or subtlety, through centuries of power, to picturesque decadence, and the beginnings of its last stand.  Even the artist might here, perchance, have seized on the dry ineffable pervading spirit, as one visiting an old cathedral seems to scent out the constriction of its heart.