"What! Even if he put you in the Bastille? Ha-ha-ha!" laughed Hanbury derisively. "That is too much indeed. Why, it is not clock making, but necromancy."
The little man stepped back a pace, looked at Hanbury contemptuously from head to foot, and said:
"It is true, although you may not be able to understand it." Then turned to Mrs. Ashton. "A clock cannot be made to go for ever quite independent of man. But I think I have invented a new means of dealing with clocks; indeed, I am quite sure my plan is absolutely new. If a constitutional tyrant were to lock me up in any bastile this instant, my clock, I mean what of it is now completed and in working order, would be wound up to-night between twelve and one o'clock, just as if I were there. I admit no stranger into my workshop."
"That is very extraordinary," said Miss Ashton, speaking for the first time.
Leigh made a gesture deprecating extraordinariness.
"I am not going in for any nonsense about perpetual motion. There will be thousands of figures in my clock, thousands of automaton Figures of Time to move in one endless procession. These figures will differ from all others to be found in horloges. They will be designed wholly to please and educate the eye by their artistic virtues and graces. The mechanical movements will be wholly subject to naturalness and beauty. I have been in great difficulty to find a worthy model for my Pallas-Athena. Until to-day I was in despair."
There appeared nothing unpleasantly marked or emphatic in Leigh's manner; but Hanbury knew he meant the model for the donor of the olive had been found in Dora. Good Heavens! this creature had dared to select as model for some imperfectly draped figure in this raree-show of charlatan mechanism the girl to whom he, John Hanbury, was engaged!
Mrs. Ashton understood the implication in the speech by an almost imperceptible reverence of the poor blighted deformed body to her beautiful, shapely, well-born daughter. A look of amusement and tenderness came into her thin, mobile, sympathetic face. "And you have been so fortunate as to find a model for your goddess?"
"Yes, and no. I did not find so much a model for my goddess as a goddess who had strayed down from the heights of Greek myth."
"This must be a lucky day with you, Mr. Leigh," Mrs. Ashton said pleasantly, and speaking as though his words referred to no one in whom she took interest. She was curious to see how he would extricate himself from a direct question. That would test his adroitness. "And when did you meet your divinity?"