but something else was not QUITE as usual—and I don't know how to describe it except as a faint suspicion that the world was already swollen with destiny and that Stourton was no longer the world—a whiff of misgiving too delicate to analyse, as when, in the ballroom of an ocean liner, some change of tempo in the engines far below communicates itself to the revellers for a phantom second and then is lost behind the rhythms of the orchestra.
