"You fool! Shut your mouth! I say it has stopped."
"No, it has not."
"It has! It has!"
"Look at that step, then! See the water just now coming over it."
The obstinate optimist stares a moment, turns pale, and then, with an oath, strikes his more clear-headed neighbor in the face! And the excited crowd behind, with the blind instinctive feeling that, somehow, he has robbed them of the hope which was but now as the breath of life to them, strike him and curse him, too.
But he had seen only too clearly.
With the steady march of fate—two inches a minute, as Cosmo Versál had accurately measured it—the water still advances and climbs upward.
In a little while they were driven to another story, and then to another. But hope would not down. They could not believe that the glad news, which had so recently filled them with joy, was altogether false. The water must have stopped rising once; it had been seen. Then, it would surely stop again, stop to rise no more.
Poor deluded creatures! With the love of life so strong within them, they could not picture, in their affrighted minds, the terrible consummation to which they were being slowly driven, when, jammed into the narrow chambers at the very top of the mighty structure, their remorseless enemy would seize them at last.
But they were nearer the end than they could have imagined even if they had accepted and coolly reasoned upon the facts that were so plain before them. And, after all, it was not to come upon them only after they had fought their way to the highest loft and into the last corner.