Her kind blue eyes met mine in an infinitude of friendliness.  Her lips in her pauses shaped in a pretty faint smile.

Old tradition was strong in us; all 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 the new time, but we bear, all three of us, the marks and liveries of the old.