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With this they emerged out of a narrow street, and saw the early
sunlight filling Leicester Square. It will never be known, I
suppose, why this square itself should look so alien and in some
ways so continental. It will never be known whether it was the
foreign look that attracted the foreigners or the foreigners who
gave it the foreign look. But on this particular morning the effect
seemed singularly bright and clear. Between the open square and the
sunlit leaves and the statue and the Saracenic outlines of the
Alhambra, it looked the replica of some French or even Spanish
public place. And this effect increased in Syme the sensation,
which in many shapes he had had through the whole adventure, the
eerie sensation of having strayed into a new world. As a fact, he
had bought bad cigars round Leicester Square ever since he was a
boy. But as he turned that corner, and saw the trees and the
Moorish cupolas, he could have sworn that he was turning into an
unknown Place de something or other in some foreign town.
At one corner of the square there projected a kind of angle of a
prosperous but quiet hotel, the bulk of which belonged to a street
behind. In the wall there was one large French window, probably
the window of a large coffee-room; and outside this window, almost
literally overhanging the square, was a formidably buttressed
balcony, big enough to contain a dining-table. In fact, it did
contain a dining-table, or more strictly a breakfast-table; and
round the breakfast-table, glowing in the sunlight and evident to
the street, were a group of noisy and talkative men, all dressed
in the insolence of fashion, with white waistcoats and expensive
button-holes. Some of their jokes could almost be heard across the
square. Then the grave Secretary gave his unnatural smile, and Syme
knew that this boisterous breakfast party was the secret conclave
of the European Dynamiters.
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