There are, as everybody knows, many ways of measuring time: and right through the ages learned men have argued heatedly in favour of their different systems. Hipparchus of Rhodes sneered every time anybody mentioned Marinus of Tyre to him: and the views of Ahmed Ibn Abdallah of Baghdad gave Purbach and Regiomontanus the laugh of their lives. Purbach in his bluff way said the man must be a perfect ass: and when Regiomontanus, whose motto was Live and let live, urged that Ahmed Ibn was just a young fellow trying to get along and ought not to be treated too harshly, Purbach said Was that so? and Regiomontanus said Yes, that was so, and Purbach said that Regiomontanus made him sick.
Tycho Brahe measured time by means of altitudes, quadrants, azimuths, cross-staves, armillary spheres and parallactic rules: and, as he often said to his wife when winding up the azimuth and putting the cat out for the night, nothing could be fairer than that. And then in 1863 along came Dollen with his Die Zeitbestimmung vermittelst des tragbaren Durchgangsinstruments im Verticale des Polarsterns (a best-seller in its day, subsequently filmed under the title Purple Sins), and proved that Tycho, by mistaking an armillary sphere for a quadrant one night after a bump-supper at Copenhagen University, had got his calculations all wrong.
The truth is that time cannot be measured. To George Finch, basking in the society of Molly Waddington, the next three weeks seemed but a flash. Whereas to Hamilton Beamish, with the girl he loved miles away in East Gilead, Idaho, it appeared incredible that any sensible person could suppose that a day contained only twenty-four hours. There were moments when Hamilton Beamish thought that something must have happened to the sidereal moon and that time was standing still.
But now the three weeks were up, and at any minute he might hear that she was back in the metropolis. All day long he had been going about with a happy smile on his face, and it was with a heart that leaped and sang from pure exuberance that he now turned to greet Officer Garroway, who had just presented himself at his apartment.
"Ah, Garroway!" said Hamilton Beamish. "How goes it? What brings you here?"
"I understood you to say, sir," replied the policeman, "that I was to bring you my poem when I had completed it."
"Of course, of course. I had forgotten all about it. Something seems to have happened to my memory these days. So you have written your first poem, eh? All about love and youth and springtime, I suppose?... Excuse me."
The telephone-bell had rung: and Hamilton Beamish, though the instrument had disappointed him over and over again in the past few days, leaped excitedly to snatch up the receiver.
"Hello?"
This time there was no disappointment. The voice that spoke was the voice he had heard so often in his dreams.