It had knocked down, I
suppose, my little customary altar, my twinkling tapers and my
flowers, and had reared itself into the likeness of a temple vast
and bare. When Neil Paraday should come out of the house he would
come out a contemporary. That was what had happened: the poor man
was to be squeezed into his horrible age. I felt as if he had been
overtaken on the crest of the hill and brought back to the city. A
little more and he would have dipped down the short cut to
posterity and escaped.
CHAPTER IV.
When he came out it was exactly as if he had been in custody, for
beside him walked a stout man with a big black beard, who, save
that he wore spectacles, might have been a policeman, and in whom
at a second glance I recognised the highest contemporary
enterprise.
"This is Mr. Morrow," said Paraday, looking, I thought, rather
white: "he wants to publish heaven knows what about me."
I winced as I remembered that this was exactly what I myself had
wanted. "Already?" I cried with a sort of sense that my friend had
fled to me for protection.
Mr. Morrow glared, agreeably, through his glasses: they suggested
the electric headlights of some monstrous modem ship, and I felt as
if Paraday and I were tossing terrified under his bows.
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