“Hum,” said Peter.  “Then you, as well as I, have reason for regarding his arrival as providential.”

XVIII

“I think something must have happened to my watch,” Peter said, next day.

Indeed, its hands moved with extraordinary, with exasperating slowness.

“It seems absurd that it should do no good to push them on,” he thought.

He would force himself, between twice ascertaining their position, to wait for a period that felt like an eternity, walking about miserably, and smoking flavourless cigarettes; —­then he would stand amazed, incredulous, when, with a smirk (as it almost struck him) of ironical complacence, they would 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 chapter would have added itself to the history of the world; a great event, a great step forward, would have definitely taken place.  He would have been received at Ventirose as a friend.  He would be no longer a mere nodding acquaintance, owing even that meagre relationship to the haphazard of propinquity.  The ice-broken, if you will, but still present in abundance—­would have been gently thawed away.  One era had passed; but then a new era would have begun.