Jim, as a matter of course, came out with him and took his arm.
“Stroll down to the bridge first?” he asked.
“Yes; may as well,” said Robin.
The moon with the clippings of three nights off the right side of its circle had risen and cleared the tree tops, and rode high in a sky dappled with mackerel-skin patches of cloud, through which its rays shone with a diffused opalescence. Now and then it streamed down a channel of clear and starry sky, and the lights and shadows became sharp-cut, but for the most part those shoals of thin cloud, on which it cast the faint colours of a pearl’s rainbow, gave to the night an illumination as of some grey, diminished day.
To-night there was no dew on the grass; over the river, bats, hunting the nocturnal insects flitted with slate-pencil squeaks, scarcely audible. A little wind blew downstream from out of the arch of the bridge, ruffling patches of the water’s surface, and lightning, very remote, winked on the horizon westwards, but so far away that no sound of its answering thunder could be heard. In a set of rooms of the buildings near the river someone was picking out a music-hall tune with painstaking study and long pauses on a metallic piano, and a boat with one solitary oarsman in it went by with the sound of dripping oar-blades and rattle of rowlocks. But for all the normal tranquillity, there was some hint of menace abroad: the puffs of wind might enlarge into a gale, the remote storm might move up with fierce, flashing blinks of lightning and sonorous gongs, and instead of the small squeaking bats, some prodigy of preying teeth and claws might launch itself on to the night.
They leaned against the stone parapet of the bridge for a minute in silence. Some indefinable ominousness was certainly abroad. It had come up as swiftly as a storm that spreads, as by the stroke of a black wing, over a clear sky.
“I feel as if someone was counting the hours,” said Robin. “There are a few more left before some clock strikes, and—and a great door opens. What is it, Jim?”
“I don’t know. But I know what I’m afraid of.”
“What’s that?” asked Robin.
“That when the clock strikes, all the life we’ve yet known will be over. Cambridge will be over——”