"_Oui, monsieur_. He was waiting for you in the garden."
The proprietor brushed past Waram and peered into the garden. It was twilight out there now. The cat still slept on the wall. Dust on the leaves. Stillness....
"I'm sorry, _monsieur_. He seems to have disappeared."
Doctor Waram straightened his shoulders. "Ah," he said. "Disappeared. Exactly." And passing Grimshaw without a glance he went upstairs.
Grimshaw spoke to the proprietor. But the little man bent over the desk, and began to write in an account book. His pen went on scratching, inscribing large, flourishing numbers in a neat column....
Grimshaw shrugged and went into the street. The crowds paid no attention to him--but then, they never had. A dog sniffed at his heels, whined, and thrust a cold nose into his hand.
He went to his house. "I'll ask Marie," he thought.... She was sitting before a mirror, her hands clasped under her chin, smiling at herself.... She had put a flower in her hair. Her lips were parted. She smiled at some secret thought. Grimshaw watched her a moment; then with a leap of his heart he touched her shoulder. And she did not turn, did not move....
He knew! He put his fingers on her cheek, her neck, the shining braids of her coarse black hair. Then he walked quickly out of the house, out of the village, toward the desert.
Two men joined him. One of them said: "I have just died." They went on together, their feet whispering in the sand, walking in a globe of darkness until the stars came out--then they saw one another's pale faces and eager, frightened eyes. Others joined them. And others. Men. Women. A child. Some wept and some murmured and some laughed.
Grimshaw thought: "The end. What next? Beauty. Love. Illusion. Forgetfulness."
He clasped his hands behind his back, lifted his face to the stars, walked steadily forward with that company of the dead, into the desert, out of the story at last.
COMET [Published originally under title, "The Comet."]
No puppy ever came into the world under more favourable conditions than Comet. He was descended from a famous family of pointers. Both his mother and father were champions. Before he opened his eyes, while he was still crawling about over his brothers and sisters, blind as puppies are at birth, Jim Thompson, Mr. Devant's kennel master, picked him out.