Explore "The Great Skene Mystery" by Bernard Capes on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
After Paradise the Deluge. But I held my head high, and laughed at the lowering heavens. I had enough faith in me to float an ark, with my heart for dove in it, waiting confidently in expectation of the green promise. Such deep and full content in myself I had never dreamed were possible. I was become another being in the prospect of my close relations with that pure and beautiful child. When I awoke on the morrow of my joy, it was surely to the same earth I had gone to sleep on; but whither translated -- to what halcyon climate? I could have believed it had caught in the train of some passing comet during the night, and been swept into a starrier, balmier region. The frost had gone; the birds were singing; a sweet and melting tenderness had usurped the places of terror. No doubt, at the same time, some clinging villainies had been brought away with it; but their necessary clearance figured no longer as the paramount interest.
They were of first moment only in their menace to my love's innocent feet; they must be cut and weeded away only that the garden of my love's soul be made perfect to her.