"Primrose Day belies your cynicism."
"Primrose Day! A fashion as much as the November bonfire. Of all the people who wear the Beaconsfield badge three-fourths could not tell you who Beaconsfield was, or how much or how little he did for England."
"Do you remember something else in Livingstone's book, how the tribes who met him said, 'Give us sleep'? It was their prayer to the wonder-worker. Give me sleep, Geoff. I'm dead beat."
"Why, we did nothing yesterday; a beggarly eight miles."
"Perhaps it was the thunderstorm that took it out of me."
"Well, sleep away. The tribes were right. There is no better gift. Would it help you if I played a little, very softly? I have a devil to-night which only music will cast out."
"Yes, play, but don't be too lugubrious. My heart is one great ache."
Without moving from his mat, Geoffrey stretched a thin hand towards the fiddle-case that lay beside his pillow, opened it noiselessly and took out the Amati; then, with his haggard eyes still fixed on the reclining figure opposite him, he drew a long sobbing chord out of the strings, and began a nocturne of Chopin's, delicatest melody played with exquisite delicacy, the very music of sleep and dreams.
"I am talking to her," he murmured to himself softly; "across the great continent, across the great sea, over burning desert and tropical wilderness, my voice is calling to her. I am telling her the story of my heart, as I used to tell her in the dear days at Discombe, the dear unheeding days, when my bow talked to her half in sport, when I hardly knew if the wild thrill that ran along my veins meant a lifelong love."
The music served as a lullaby for Allan, and it soothed Geoffrey, whose brain had been over-charged with hideous fancies, as he sat up in his bed, listening to the ticking of the watch that hung against the wall, and looking at his slumbering companion.