Geoffrey gave a little gasp and laid his hand upon his chest.
"What is it?" he said. "There is a pain here like a knife. I am burning."
Nobody took the faintest notice. Only Ralph seemed to be alive, and yet there was no kind of expression on his face. Heads were drawing nearer and nearer to the vases where the graceful flowers were grouped—those innocent looking blooms which were the emblems of all that was fair and fine and beautiful.
What did it mean, what strange mystery was here? Nobody could speak, nobody wanted to speak; all were sinking, lulled and soothed into a poppyland sleep, even Geoffrey who seemed to be fighting for something he knew not what.
Then Ralph reached out his hand to the foot of the table. His long, lean fingers were tangled in the strip of damask down the mahogany table on which lamps and decanters and glasses and dishes of fruit were placed.
With a vigorous pull he brought the whole thing crashing on the polished floor, where two pools of paraffin made a blaze of the wreck that Ralph had caused. Then he slid over the floor and opened one of the windows, letting in the pure air fresh from the North Sea.
CHAPTER XVII WHENCE DID THEY COME?
In the darkness nobody spoke for a moment. Not one of them could have said anything for a king's ransom. Apart from the feeling of suffocation, the gradual poppy sleep of death that filled the room as a great wave suddenly engulfs some rocky cave, the dramatic horror of the darkness held them fast.