"It's such a thick fog, Major dear. As soon as it clears a little we'll open the window. Won't we, Sally?"
"Is Sally there?... Come and touch my hand, kitten.... That's right...." What is left of the Major can still enjoy the plump little white hand that takes the old fingers that once could grasp the sword that hangs on the wall. It will not be for very long now. A newspaper paragraph will soon give a short record of all the battles that sword left its scabbard to see, and will tell of its owner's service in his later days as deputy Commissioner at Umritsur, and of the record of long residence in India it established, exceeding that of his next competitor by many years. Not a few old warriors that were in those battles, and many that knew his later time, will follow him beyond it very soon. But he is not gone yet, and his hand can just give back its pressure to Sally's, as she sits by him, keeping her heart in and her tears back. The actual collapse of vital forces has not come—will not come for a few days. He can speak a little as she stoops to hear him.
"Young people like you ought to be in bed, chick, getting beauty-sleep.
You must go home, and make your mother go.... You go. I shall be all right...."
"It isn't night, Major dear"—Sally makes a paltry attempt to laugh—"it's three in the afternoon. It's the fog." But she cannot hear what he says in answer to this, go close as she may. After a pause of rest he tries again, with raised voice:
"Roper—Roper—Old Jack ... mustn't come ... asthma in the fog ... somebody go to stop him." He is quite clear-headed, and when Sally says she will go at once, he spots the only risk she would run, being young and healthy:
"Sure you can find your way? Over the club-house—Hurkaru Club——" And then is stopped by a threat of returning cough.
But Sally knows all about it, and can find her way anywhere—so she says. She is off in a twinkling, leaving her mother and the nurse to wait for the terrible attack that means to come, in due course, as soon as the new cough-mixture gets tired.
Sally is a true Londoner. She won't admit, whoever else does, that a fog is a real evil. On the contrary, she inclines to Prussian tactics—flies in the face of adverse criticism with the decision that a fog is rather a lark when you're out in it. Actually face to face with a human creature choking, Sally's optimism had wavered. It recovers itself in the bracing atmosphere of a main-thoroughfare charged to bursting with lines of vehicles, any one of which would go slowly alone, but the collective slowness of which finds a vent in a deadlock a mile away—an hour before we can move, we here.
By what human agency it comes about that any wheeled vehicle drawn of horses can thunder at a hand-gallop through the matrix of such a deadlock, Heaven only knows! But the glare of the lamps of the fire-brigade, hot upon the wild excitement of their war-cry, shows that this particular agglomeration of brass and copper, fraught with suppressed energy of steam well up, means to try for it—seems to have had some success already, in fact. It quite puts Sally in spirits—the rapid crescendo of the hissing steam, the gleaming boiler-dome that might be the fruitful mother of all the helmets that hang about her skirts, the sudden leaping of the whole from the turgid opacity behind and equally sudden disappearance into the void beyond, the vanishing "Fire!" cry from which all consonants have gone, leaving only a sound