For a minute he was silent. "Better wait
for her letter," he said at last. "He's her cousin, after all, and Mrs.
Grundy's dead--in the Euston Road, at all events."
So, trying to spare each other all they could of anxiety, and careful
to abstain from any hint of trouble before the servants, they dined and
went to bed.
At that hour between the night and morning, when man's vitality is
lowest, and the tremors of his spirit, like birds of ill omen, fly round
and round him, beating their long plumes against his cheeks, Stephen
woke.
It was very still. A bar of pearly-grey dawn showed between the filmy
curtains, which stirred with a regular, faint movement, like the puffing
of a sleeper's lips. The tide of the wind, woven in Mr. Stone's fancy of
the souls of men, was at low ebb. Feebly it fanned the houses and hovels
where the myriad forms of men lay sleeping, unconscious of its breath;
so faint life's pulse, that men and shadows seemed for that brief moment
mingled in the town's sleep. Over the million varied roofs, over the
hundred million little different shapes of men and things, the
wind's quiet, visiting wand had stilled all into the wonder state of
nothingness, when life is passing into death, death into new life, and
self is at its feeblest.
And Stephen's self, feeling the magnetic currents of that ebb-tide
drawing it down into murmurous slumber, out beyond the sand-bars of
individuality and class, threw up its little hands and began to cry for
help.
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