In vain.
His jaws opened. He laughed—a dreadful peal of merriment that echoed up and down the latticed street. And as he laughed, he knew that he raised a peril nearer, more fearful even than that from which he had been flying.
There was an instant's shocked calm, like the silence which follows the distant spurt of blue flame from the muzzle of a Krupp gun. Then, like its answering detonation—in such a menacing roar as might arise from the brink of an Inferno—the silence of the quiet street burst into awful sound.
Ten minutes later but a single lighted shoji glimmered on the darkened thoroughfare. The roadway was deserted save for a soldierly figure in policeman's uniform who stood thoughtfully looking at a huddle in the dim roadway—a mixture of wrenched and battered iron and glass, in the midst of which lay an inert, shapeless something that might have been a bundle of old clothes fallen from a scavenger's cart.
CHAPTER LII
THE VOICE IN THE DARK
Barbara rested ill in her cabin bed that night. Confused dreams troubled her, mingling familiar thoughts in kaleidoscopic confusion, dragging her from one tangle to another in a wearying rapidity against which she struggled in vain. One thing ran through them all—the gold-lacquer Buddha that had stood on the Sendai chest in her bedroom at the Embassy; only it seemed to be also that lost image before which she had used to sit as a child.
She had no feeling of awakening, but all at once the visions were gone and she lay open-eyed, swinging to the movement of the sea, feeling the night to be very long. There came over her a creeping oppression—a sense of terror of the night, of its hidden mysteries and occult forces. The darkness seemed to be holding some dreadful, stolid, lethargic thing that sprawled from horizon to horizon.