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The scene invited alarm, that is, for so young a girl as Violet, surveying it from an automobile some time after the stroke of midnight. An unknown house at the end of a heavily shaded walk, in the open doorway of which could be seen the silhouette of a woman's form leaning eagerly forward with arms outstretched in an appeal for help!
Strange, with the undivided attention of the audience upon him, began to cut Blaze's silhouette. He was extraordinarily adept, and despite his subject's restlessness he completed the likeness in a few moments; then, fixing it upon a plain white cardboard, he presented it with a flourish. Blaze accepted the thing and plunged for the open air. "What ails you?"
In the greenish sky the stars glitter, not sharply as they do elsewhere, but like fine dots, softly, quietly, as if a negligent hand had sprinkled them lightly about. And down by the water the breakers roll, crickets cry, a flying-fox chatters and changes from one tree to the other with tired wings, passing in a shapeless silhouette in front of the moon.
Naturally the vegetation in this poor soil is very scanty, only bushes and reed-grass, irregularly scattered in the valleys between little hillocks ranged in rows. This arid desert-scene is doubly surprising to the eye, owing to the sudden change from the forest to the bare plain. In this seemingly endless plain, the two craters rise in a bold silhouette, grimly black.
So on he went, straight ahead, his eyes on the ground, and his hands in his pockets, until he emerged upon one of the old forest roads where the grass had begun to burst through the stony interstices; and there, in the distance, under the light tracery of weaving branches, a delicate female silhouette was outlined on the dark background.
When I awoke the guards were crowded with passengers in a high state of excitement, pointing and craning shoreward. Looking in the same direction I saw, through the haze, the sharp outlines of a city in gray silhouette. Roofs, spires, pinnacles, chimneys, angles of wall all were there, cleanly cut out against the air. "What is it?" I cried, springing to my feet.
It was darker now, being near to that darkest hour before the dawn, and the slit of sky above was somber. But he rode on at a good walk until he was about half way through the gorge. Then he heard sounds above, and drawing his horse in by the cliff he stopped and waited. Voices came down to him, and once or twice he caught the partial silhouette of a horse against the dark sky.
Throwing up first one leg then the other in black silhouette against the stars, he sang: "And we won't be home till morning, till morning " The voice drifted up from the corner of Taylor and Broadway, where the two men waited for a car. "Till daylight doth appear." Mrs. Paula was gasping. "Well, I never never " she exclaimed, as Isabel hastily marshalled her up the stair and into the house.
The smooth green lawns were all dappled with white and wore a pinched and chilly look save under the big and solemn firs where the ground, warmed by its canopy of branches and coverlet of cones, had thawed in dark patches. The gravel walks were firm and dry; and in the rosery the bare skeleton of the pergolas stood out in clear-cut silhouette against a white and woolly sky.
Something had happened during that moment while he stood looking into her tear-flushed eyes; something momentous, critical, which no previous experience in her life had prepared her for. And it had happened to him, too. The memory of his silhouette as he stood there with his hands clenched, between her and the window, would have convinced her, had she needed convincing.
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