Lawrence lay awake long enough to hear the professor’s deep breathing, and his muttering of something once or twice. Then he lay gazing at the old lawyer, thinking how comical it was, and what a change from Guilford Street in busy London, till it all seemed to be dim and strange and dreamlike.
Then it really was dreamlike, for, though the old lawyer was still marching up and down before Lawrence’s mental vision, it seemed to him that he had swollen out to ten times his natural size, and that he was not walking to and fro between him and the sea, but in front of the railings in Bloomsbury, and that, to prevent his making a noise and disturbing the sleepers, he had wound list all about his boots, which now made not a sound upon the pavement.
To and fro, to and fro he seemed to go, till his head swelled and swelled and no longer appeared to be a head, but a great rough grenadier’s cap, and it was no longer Mr Burne, but one of the sentries in front of the British Museum, who marched, and marched, and marched, till he marched right out of sight, and all was blank as a deep, deep sleep is sometimes, from which the lad started into wakefulness just before dawn, upon hearing the professor say loudly:
“Eh? What? Is it time?”
Chapter Fourteen.
How Mr Burne kept Watch.
“Yes, effendi, quite time,” said a stern voice which Lawrence, as he sat up, recognised as Yussuf’s; and there was the grave-looking Turk, misty and strange of aspect, bending down.
“Quite time, eh?” said Mr Preston yawning.