He said that before he had gone through his pass-book and his litter of papers. Inadequate as the cause seems, it was that girl’s voice and the expression of her eyes that precipitated his discontent. But certainly the discovery that he had no longer even one hundred thousand pounds’ worth of realisable property behind him was the poison that made the wound deadly.
It was the next day after this that he exploded upon Woodhouse and his workmen, and thereafter his bearing was consistently grim for three weeks, and anxiety dwelt in Cheam and Ewell, Malden, Morden, and Worcester Park, places that had thriven mightily on his experiments.
Four weeks after that first swearing of his, he stood with Woodhouse by the reconstructed machine as it lay across the elevated railway, by means of which it gained its initial impetus. The new propeller glittered a brighter white than the rest of the machine, and a gilder, obedient to a whim of Monson’s, was picking out the aluminium bars with gold. And looking down the long avenue between the ropes (gilded now with the sunset), one saw red signals, and two miles away an ant-hill of workmen busy altering the last falls of the run into a rising slope.
“I’ll come,” said Woodhouse. “I’ll come right enough. But I tell you it’s infernally foolhardy. If only you would give another year”—
“I tell you I won’t. I tell you the thing works. I’ve given years enough”—
“It’s not that,” said Woodhouse. “We’re all right with the machine. But it’s the steering”—
“Haven’t I been rushing, night and morning, backwards and forwards, through this squirrel’s cage? If the thing steers true here, it will steer true all across England. It’s just funk, I tell you, Woodhouse. We could have gone a year ago. And besides”—
“Well?” said Woodhouse.
“The money!” snapped Monson over his shoulder.
“Hang it! I never thought of the money,” said Woodhouse, and then, speaking now in a very different tone to that with which he had said the words before, he repeated, “I’ll come. Trust me.”