"I told you to be ready! The years, do you hear me? You are wasting the years. She's good for sixty miles an hour and it will take forty million years to reach the nearest star, where Helen waits. Can't make it, you say? Don't I see her beckoning!"
Then he turned his head, slightly, as if he were addressing some one very near.
"One has to have patience," he said. "They don't understand, and their fingers are all thumbs, and the hawser is fouling my propeller, and Helen calls, and—and I can do nothing."
His head, that had been slightly uplifted, fell back again, and two great drops gathered in the dark, sunken eyes and slowly ran down the hollowed cheeks.
Mr. Barnett turned to me. In his eyes there was a strange look of apprehension, as when one awaits yet fears an answer. But there was nothing that I could say to him. My heart was beating as though ready to burst. I cared nothing then for the little man who stared at me, and sank on my knees beside my poor unconscious John, lifting his limp hand to my lips.
CHAPTER XXI
From Miss Helen Jelliffe to Miss Jane Van Zandt
Aunt Jennie, darling:
Isn't the world just the most wonderful place? No one knows it at all until after it has played battledore and shuttlecock with them, and they have been tossed to and fro for a long time. Weren't those old Persians wonderful people? Of course they had no means of knowing the real truth but it surely was the next thing to it to worship the dear sun. It goes away and leaves things dark and dismal, and there may be hail and sleet and rain, and the outlook is all dark, but presently the clouds move and the fog blows away and the path of light twinkles over the big ocean and the very grasses of the hillsides perk up and the birds try to split their little throats with song. They are all sun-worshippers.
Of course you want to know at once how it all came about. I am still shaky and uncertain, as if I had just been awakened. Sometimes I hardly believe that it is the real truth that I behold, but merely some vision that must pass away like the gold and the crimson of the fading day.