Portentously

There have been moments during the last ten years when I have fell so portentously old, so fagged and finished, that I should have taken as a very bad joke any intimation that this present sense of juvenility was still in store for me.

The cold light of the moon touched every face with unnatural paleness; and the silence was unbroken and portentously profound.

At that moment a long, scraggy individual in a checked suit poked his head into the bar, looked around portentously, whistled mysteriously to my informant, and jerked his thumb and head in the direction of the door.

Shirky ends the story of the lost Sidekick by asking, portentously, “What happens next?”—no doubt imagining future waves of digital protesters.