Strand, and it comes across my mind that they are but the ghosts of the
past, haunting the streets that I have seen silent and wretched, going
to and fro, phantasms in a dead city, the mockery of life in a
galvanised body. And strange, too, it is to stand on Primrose Hill, as
I did but a day before writing this last chapter, to see the great
province of houses, dim and blue through the haze of the smoke and
mist, vanishing at last into the vague lower sky, to see the people
walking to and fro among the flower beds on the hill, to see the
sight-seers about the Martian machine that stands there still, to hear
the tumult of playing children, and to recall the time when I saw it
all bright and clear-cut, hard and silent, under the dawn of that last
great day. . . .
And strangest of all is it to hold my wife s hand again, and to think
that I have counted her, and that she has counted me, among the dead.
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