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In this dingy room, smelling of dust and drugs and the heavy odour of the ailantus tree, she felt a presence more profoundly real, more poignantly significant, than any material forms the presence of those elemental forces which connect time with eternity. This little room, within its partial shadow, like the shadow of time itself, was touched with the solemnity of a cathedral.
Events justified the selection: both Bees exploited the foreign flora with the same assiduity as the local flora, passing from the lilac to the ailantus, from the briar to the physostegia, leaving the one, going back to the other, without drawing distinctions between the known and the unknown.
In silence the cripple led the way, and in silence they followed her, until she opened the closed door at the end of the hall, and they entered the room, with the sickening sweetish smell and the window which gave on the black hulk of the ailantus tree.
A white, dazzling, and bewildering flash of lightning suddenly lit up the room, the porch, the dripping ailantus, and the flooded street beyond. It was followed presently by a crash of thunder, with what seemed to be a second fainter flash of lightning, or rather as if the first flash had suddenly ignited some inflammable substance.
And when all these are done, and in the paved and noisy aisles of the city the ailantus, with all its greenness gone, lifts up its skeleton fingers to the God of Autumn and of storms, the dogwood still guards its crown; and the branches, which stretched their white canvas in April, now bear up a spire of bloody tongues, that lie against the leafless woods like a tree on fire!
It was already autumn, and in the city of New York an early Sunday morning breeze was sweeping up the leaves that had fallen from the regularly planted ailantus trees before the brown-stone frontage of a row of monotonously alike five-storied houses on one of the principal avenues.
The defunct back yard is being covered by an extension that will give Martin a fine library, with a side window and a scrap of balcony, while the ailantus tree is left, that bob-tailed Josephus may not be deprived of the feline pleasures of the street or his original way of reaching it over the side fence; and the flower garden that was, will be the foundation of a garden of books under the kindly doctrine of compensation.
"There, Helen, that's enough to make you sign the pledge!" said Gifford. He watched them walking down the street, under the arching ailantus, their footsteps muffled by the carpet of the fallen blossoms; and there was a thoughtful look on his face when he went into his office, and, lighting his lamp, sat down to look over some papers. "How is that going to come out?" he said to himself.
The broad leaves of the ailantus began to rustle; an ominous pattering followed; the rain had recommenced. And as Courtland rose and walked towards the open window its blank panes and the interior of the office were suddenly illuminated by a gleam of returning lightning. He entered the office, bidding Cato follow, and lit the lamp above his desk.
The minutes dragged by like hours while they waited there, in hushed suspense, for they scarcely knew what. Outside in the backyard, the flowering ailantus tree shed a disagreeable odour; downstairs the feeble crying, which had stopped for a little while, was beginning again. While she remained motionless at the foot of the bed, wild and rebellious thoughts flocked through Corinna's mind.
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