Page:The Inheritors, An Extravagant Story.djvu/242

 into the courtyard. The light was growing stronger. She did not answer.

"I tell you," he asseverated insistently, "if the British Government abandons my railway all our plans . . ."

"Oh, the Government won't abandon it," she said, with a little emphasis on the verb. He stepped back out of range of the wheels, and we turned in and left him standing there.

In the great room which was usually given up to the political plotters stood a table covered with eatables and lit by a pair of candles in tall silver sticks. I was conscious of a raging hunger and of a fierce excitement that made the thought of sleep part of a past of phantoms. I began to eat unconsciously, pacing up and down the while. She was standing beside the table in the glow of the transparent light. Pallid blue lines showed in the long windows. It was very cold and hideously late; away in those endless small hours when the pulse drags, when the clock-beat drags, when time is effaced.

"You see?" she said suddenly.