Out of the Past — page 137: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

134 Out of the Past. the summer-house. “Books!” cried Benedict, “in a sea- shell like this. Tolstoi, Maeterlinck—there is a mine of nuggets.” By this time he was growing breathless, and his coffee, steaming at his right hand, he tasted it carefully and a dozen times set it down to look in their faces with infinite satisfaction. “Mes enfants!” he said again and again, with an in- describable accent which brought a mist to their eyes. “Tell us of your travels, Pater.” Immediately Bene- dict’s face fell. “Ah, it has been a sorry business. But it will bear tell- ing here amid your joy.” A sudden expressive lift of his eyebrows caused Rose to send Babette away. He leaned across the table nearer to them. “You have been watching the drift of affairs; you have seen pieces of wreckage on the political current; you have seen uneasiness in the people, fear at the Bourse; you have heard the priests denounce justice from the sacred place by order of their superiors; you may have suspected that that presaged a great fear for the stability of our institutions; you have seen cabinets dissolve and ministers fall out to drown in the current—all this, and no one knows what it portends or what is its cause. I have been sent through the land to discover what I could. (I would they had sent another. My heart is sick with EORNICOOOKS AO