"Now I shan't change the day of my stone-laying. But don't worry about your Conference. You know it'll be perfectly all right!" He spoke archly, with a brave attempt at cajolery. But in the recesses of his soul he was not sure that she had not defeated him in this their first [207] encounter. However, Seven Sachs might talk as he chose—she was not such a persuasive creature as all that! She had scarcely even tried to be persuasive.
At about a quarter-past six when he saw his underling again he said to Mr. Marrier:
"Marrier, I've got a great idea. We'll have that corner-stone-laying at night. After the theatres. Say half-past eleven. Torchlight! Fireworks from the cranes! It'll tickle old Pilgrim to death. I shall have a marquee with matchboarding sides fixed up inside, and heat it with a few of those smokeless stoves. We can easily lay on electricity. It will be absolutely the most sensational stone-laying that ever was. It'll be in all the papers all over the blessed world. Think of it! Torches! Fireworks from the cranes!... But I won't change the day—neither for Miss April nor anybody else."
Mr. Marrier dissolved in laudations.
"Well," Edward Henry agreed with false diffidence. "It'll knock spots off some of 'em in this town!"
He felt that he had snatched victory out of defeat. But the next moment he was capable of feeling that Elsie April had defeated him even in his victory. Anyhow, she was a most disconcerting and fancy-monopolizing creature.
There was one source of unsullied gratification, he had shaved off his beard.
VI
"Come up here, Sir John," Edward Henry called. "You'll see better, and you'll be out of the crowd. And I'll show you something."
He stood, in a fur coat, at the top of a short flight of rough-surfaced steps between two unplastered walls—a staircase which ultimately was to form part of an emergency exit from the dress-circle of the Regent Theatre. Sir John Pilgrim, also in a fur coat, stood near the bottom of the steps, with the glare of a Wells light full on him and throwing his shadow almost up to Edward Henry's feet. Around, Edward Henry could descry the vast mysterious forms of the building's skeleton—black in places, but in other places lit up by bright rays from the gaiety below, and showing glimpses of that gaiety in the occasional revelation of a woman's cloak through slits in the construction. High overhead two gigantic cranes interlaced their arms; and, even higher than the cranes, shone the stars of the clear spring night.