THREE:His suggestion was adopted, and they at once set about their work, determined to write two hours daily till they had described Canton so fully that their friends would know exactly what was to be seen there. They divided the work, as they had done on previous occasions, one of them making a description of a certain part of their route, and the other taking another portion of it. When they were through with it, they put the two stories together, and found that they fitted to perfection. Here is what they wrote:The clock chimed again, and his room had grown so dark that he had to turn on the electric light to see what the hour was. He went downstairs and through the show rooms, blazing with lights still populous with customers, into the square. The toneless blue of night had already advanced far past the zenith; in the west a band of orange marked where the sun had set, and just above it was a space of delicate pale green on the upper{306} edge of which a faint star twinkled. As he passed between the hornbeam hedges in the disused graveyard, the odour of the spring night, of dew on the path, of the green growth on the trees, was alert in the air. The mysterious rapture of the renewal of life tingled round him, the summons to expand, to blossom, to love was echoed and re-echoed from the bushes, where mated birds were still chirruping. As he walked through the gathering dusk, thick with the choruses of spring, the years fell from him like withered leaves long-lingering, and his step quickened into the pace of youth, though it only bore him to The Cedars, and the amazing futility of one of Lady Keelings smaller dinner-parties.
