Suddenly it went out, and shone no more.
Miles crept from bed to window, and watched. He counted off three, four, five minutes, and saw not another gleam. Dismayed, blaming himself for suffering Tony to have his way, he wrestled into clothes, stole downstairs, and raced through the sharp night air. Thin fog, shoulder-high, had just begun to billow along the ground, concealing and magnifying, even by starlight. Each tussock, each baby fir, loomed like a waiting figure or stretched like a dead body. Silent over the wet grass, Miles ran downhill toward the spot where the light had ceased.
Nearing the shore, he brushed through the chill aspersion of bristling thickets, when suddenly the light gleamed again, fixed, through the lowest boughs. He stopped, listened, then slipped forward cautiously, toward a murmur of voices. Subdued but unmistakable, it was the broken sing-song of that speech from the other side of the world. He threaded without a sound the interstitial windings of the underbrush, and crouched at the edge of the clearing.
On the old quarter-deck, the lantern burned dimly. As in a luminous smoke, two men sat talking, with now and then a gesture that set enormous hands, outspread fingers, wavering on the magic-lantern screen of the fog. Their alien tones rose and fell, in a quiet, scolding incantation.
The more vehement speaker was Tony. Facing him, oddly squatting upon heels, the yellow man of the tower nodded continually, amicably, sagely, like a toy mandarin.
CHAPTER IV
PAN’S PIPES
At breakfast Tony discoursed readily as ever, smiled as engagingly, with glances no less frank, provocative, or droll. Twice he forced old Mr. Bissant to brighten his cloudy morning face, to smite with open palm his short white curls, and chuckle; once, even, to parry joke with joke. But Miles sat dazed and unhappy. Their little house, lacking so many things, had lacked also the presence of a lie; before that presence, now, he came awkwardly, and as it were with eyes averted. He heard Tony laugh, saw the white flash of his teeth, the quick, foreign heave of his burly shoulders, the nameless turns of speech and look by which friend signals to friend; he knew Tony for the same man of yesterday, challenging the same admiration; yet between himself and all this, a single night had stretched a dismal vacuum, a distance slight, but both intensive and insulating. The sudden change puzzled him abominably.