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The Ball and the Cross by G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
page 276 of 309 (89%)
fancy that the sunlight was caught there tangled in its tinted
trees, as the wise men of Gotham tried to chain the spring to a
bush. Or it seemed as if this ironic paradise still kept its
unique dawn or its special sunset while the rest of the earthly
globe rolled through its ordinary hours. There was one evening,
or late afternoon, in particular, which Evan MacIan will remember
in the last moments of death. It was what artists call a daffodil
sky, but it is coarsened even by reference to a daffodil. It was
of that innocent lonely yellow which has never heard of orange,
though it might turn quite unconsciously into green. Against it
the tops, one might say the turrets, of the clipt and ordered
trees were outlined in that shade of veiled violet which tints
the tops of lavender. A white early moon was hardly traceable
upon that delicate yellow. MacIan, I say, will remember this
tender and transparent evening, partly because of its virgin gold
and silver, and partly because he passed beneath it through the
most horrible instant of his life.

Turnbull was sitting on his seat on the lawn, and the golden
evening impressed even his positive nature, as indeed it might
have impressed the oxen in a field. He was shocked out of his
idle mood of awe by seeing MacIan break from behind the bushes
and run across the lawn with an action he had never seen in the
man before, with all his experience of the eccentric humours of
this Celt. MacIan fell on the bench, shaking it so that it
rattled, and gripped it with his knees like one in dreadful pain
of body. That particular run and tumble is typical only of a man
who has been hit by some sudden and incurable evil, who is bitten
by a viper or condemned to be hanged. Turnbull looked up in the
white face of his friend and enemy, and almost turned cold at
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