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This was the last human sound. Asako soon was able to distinguish at least ten or twelve different songs, all metallic in character, like clock springs being slowly wound up and then let down with a run. The night and the house vibrated with these infinitesimal chromatics. Sometimes Asako thought the creatures must have got into her room, and feared for entanglements in her hair.
I lay down on a sofa opposite the alcove, and the coldness of death settled on my soul. The pulsation of the blood in the arteries is a sort of clock, the ticking of which can be heard only at night. Man, free from exterior attractions, falls back upon himself; he hears himself live.
How could it be possible to bring all the vital functions to a dead stop like that, and yet keep them in such a state that it might be possible for that's what I suppose you are driving at to start them into activity again, just as one might wind up a clock that had been stopped for a few weeks and set it going?
"Oh, the cabin lockers be " began Potter; then he pulled himself up short. "No," he resumed, "I couldn't think of you sleeping on the lockers; they're that hard and uncomfortable you'd never be able to get a bit of real rest on 'em; to say nothing of Purchas or me coming in, off and on, during the night to look at the clock, or the barometer, or what not, and disturbing you.
In this way his progress homeward was not very rapid, and the clock had struck ten long ere they reached the inn, which they found still and dark, save the light which was kept burning in 'Lena's room. "That's her chamber the young gal's where you see the candle," said Uncle Timothy, as they drew up before the huge walls of the tavern. "I guess you won't want to disturb her to-night."
Though the depth of the fortress prevented me from knowing the time, it felt to be early afternoon by that strange internal clock that so seldom errs. It was correct, as usual.
He looked about in that very place for his own image; but another man stood in his accustomed corner, and though the clock pointed to his usual time of day for being there, he saw no likeness of himself among the multitudes that poured in through the Porch.
It had been, he recalled on some one of those occasions of social approval by which it appeared engagements in the Best Society proceeded, that he had sat thus, waiting until the clock ticked on the moment when he might properly join her, sat so full of the sense of her that for the instant he accepted her unannounced appearance at the darkened doorway as the mere extension of his white-heated fancy.
Through the deathlike silence of the night there came from time to time the chimes of the clock of a distant church, but he continued to sit there motionless, taking no heed of the passing hours, and possessed with an awful terror. So this was the beginning of the end! And afterwards the other two would be left by themselves at the mercy of the world.
Toward eleven o'clock that same morning he was pottering idly about his sitting-room, winding his clock and shaking down the ashes in the tiled flamboyant stove; his mind was still busy going over for the hundredth time all the possibilities of Hiram Wade's suit, and he was just wondering whether something in the way of a compromise might not be arranged, when with the suddenness of a blow between the eyes the numbness in his head returned, together with the same unreasoning fear, the same depression of spirits, the same fearful sinking of the heart.
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