the stillness
unbroken by a single echo.
The night--the last night of the old year--was fine; the white,
clear light from a moon they could not see grew wide and clear
over the city, as the last gleam of the sunset faded. It was just
warm enough for the window to be open, and for nearly three hours
Condy and Blix sat looking down upon the city in these last
moments of the passing year, feeling upon their faces an
occasional touch of the breeze, that carried with it the smell of
trees and flowers from the gardens below them, and the faint fine
taint of the ocean from far out beyond the Heads. But the scene
was not in reality silent. At times when they listened intently,
especially when they closed their eyes, there came to them a
subdued, steady bourdon, profound, unceasing, a vast, numb murmur,
like no other sound in all the gamut of nature--the sound of a
city at night, the hum of a great, conglomerate life, wrought out
there from moment to moment under the stars and under the moon,
while the last hours of the old year dropped quietly away.
A star fell.
Sitting in the window, the two noticed it at once, and Condy
stirred for the first time in fifteen minutes.
"That was a very long one," he said, in a low voice. "Blix, you
must write to me--we must write each other often."
"Oh, yes," she answered. "We must not forget each other; we have
had too good a time for that."
"Four years is a long time," he went on.
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