"Don't you hear that bell, you ass? Doesn't that tell you what you've done? You've piled us on the rocks off the eastern end of Plum Island. And God in Heaven only knows how you managed to get so far off the course!"
Breathing to the night air thanks which would have driven Captain Monk mad could he have heard them, Lanyard let go the bronze blade and struck out for the melancholy bell.
Ten minutes later the fingers of one hand--he was swimming on his side--at the bottom of its stroke touched pebbles.
He lowered his feet and waded through extensive shallows to a wide and sandy beach.
[XXVIII]
FINALE
The window of the living-room in his suite at the Walpole, set high in cliff-like walls, commanded a southward vista of Fifth Avenue whose enchantment, clothed in ever changing guises of light and shade, was so potent that Lanyard, on the first day of his tenancy, thought it could never tire. Yet by noon of the third he was viewing it with the eyes of soul-destroying ennui, though the disfavour it had so quickly won in his sight was, he knew, due less to cloying familiarity than to the uncertainty and discontent that were eating out his heart.
Three days before, immediately on arriving in New York and installing himself in this hotel, to whose management he was well known from other days, he had cabled Eve de Montalais and Wertheimer.
The response to the latter--a cheerful request that credit be arranged for him by cable--was as prompt and satisfactory as he had expected it to be.
But from Madame de Montalais he heard nothing.