"That's it. Quick as you can."
"I send 'im now, I blerdy will. We find ze trawlers blerdy soon."
Jean Prevost showed a regrettable liberality in the use of this popular adjective which he firmly believed lent vitality and refinement to any sentence.
"That'll set them thinking," said Barraclough, as he turned away with a smile. "Ha, the Eddystone!"
In direct line with their course rising like a thin twig out of the sea showed the silhouette of the lighthouse, while between it and the now faintly discernible mainland tiny dots of brown showed upon the water.
Your true Englishman is an absurd creation for he cannot return to his native land even after the shortest absence, he cannot see the faint familiar landmarks, the nestling villages, the rolling downs, the white chalk or grey granite of her battlements, without a throb of honest grateful pride. An imperial singing sounds in his ears—tuned to the measure of breaking surf—such a song as lovers sing whose single words are no more than this, "I am yours and you are mine."
"Tonight," he said. "Tonight I shall see her again."
There was the appointment at his rooms at 11 o'clock when he would place the concession in Mr. Torrington's hands. That would be a big moment. He could imagine Cranbourne's unbridled enthusiasm, Lord Almont's congratulations in the style of P. G. Wodehouse, and Cassis, that person of dry ashes and parchment, unbending to the greatness of the occasion. He, Barraclough, was a made man, every newspaper in the country would send its reporters to clamour at his doors, every charity seek his aid when the story and the magnitude of his find became known. From an ordinary commonplace individual, he would be transformed into a figure of the age, the observed of all eyes, the target of every tongue. And yet, the world at his feet, the wealth, the prominence, the power, the achievement, faded and dwindled into nothing at all beside one absurd but adorable longing. It was the thought of Isabel sitting on the floor, hugging her knees, resting her chin upon them, looking at him with great wide open eyes, smiling at him with moist trembling lips.
Over head the aerial fizzed and crackled as his message voyaged forth into space. The tiny dots between the Eddystone and the land took form and detail and became the brown sails of a fishing fleet lolling idly in the bay.
A hand on his shoulder aroused him from his reverie and he turned to find Jean Prevost standing beside him.