Among the many visitors who flocked to see this wonderful invention came one day Verheyden, Alice Rothsay, and her cousin Rose.
They stood and watched smoothly slipping cylinders that coquetted with a hand of gold from every gazing window, large wheels that turned deliberately on their dizzy centres, and little families of cogged wheels that made them feel cross-eyed—all the deceitful gentleness and guileful glitter of the creature.
Alice Rothsay stretched a venturesome pink finger-tip toward a lazily rocking bar, then with a shiver, drew it back. "But I like to look at machinery," she said; "it is so self-possessed. Besides, it is full of curves, which are amiable as well as graceful. Parallels are unsocial, and angles are disagreeable."
"Parallels are faithful if not fond," remarked the machinist, "and straight lines have an aim and arrive at places. They are the honest lines, the working lines, the strong lines. The reasoner's thought goes like an arrow, the dreamer's like smoke on a heavy day. I would rather see a cat pounce upon a mouse than run round after her own tail."
"But the spiral," she ventured.
"Oh! that's the supernatural," said the machinist.
"For my part," said Rose, "I don't see why the cat, after having caught her mouse, should not amuse herself by running round after her own tail. It keeps her out of the cream."
Miss Rothsay turned to look at Verheyden, who was examining another part of the machine. As she looked, he stretched his right hand to point a question, and stretched it too far. The cruel teeth caught it, there was a sharp breath that was not quite a cry. John Maynard sprang to stop the machine, and in a moment Verheyden drew back, wild-eyed, but silent, holding up a crushed and bleeding hand.
"There is no pain," he said as Maynard knotted the handkerchief about his arm. But he staggered while speaking, and the next moment fell.
Miss Rothsay had news of him that evening. His hand had been amputated, and he was wild. He wanted to tear the ligatures from his arm and bleed to death, had to be restrained and drugged into quiet. Her messenger had left him in a morphia-sleep, pale as the dead, and with only the faintest breathing.