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"Six-thirty, and the clock's a bit slow at that." Farwell felt sure it was a good ten minutes slow; but because of that he turned the conversation. "Jerry McAlpin was telling me to-day," he said in his low, pleasant voice, "of how he and others used to smuggle liquor over the border. Jerry seems repenting of his past." Mary laughed and shrugged her shoulders.
The clock ticked, and the faint, far-off street noises came through the intervening screens, but only one of the men in the room seemed to be breathing. At last Saxham's grey lips moved. He said in a horrible clicking whisper: "Van Busch and Bough are one?" Major Wrynche's large face nodded in the affirmative. But it was as expressionless as the grandfather clock's.
'She will shirk the interview, Tresten remarked. 'Supposing they meet: I don't think much will come of it, unless they meet on a field, and he has an hour's grace to catch her up and be off with her. She's as calm as the face of a clock, and wags her Yes and No about him just as unconcernedly as a clock's pendulum.
Now it is something more, and we know that our mahogany friend is really wagging his brassy beard just outside the door. We remember now, as we lay listening that rough night at sea, how Milton's magic sounding line came to us beating a sad melody with the old clock's imagined tramp, "The Lars and Lemures moan with midnight plaint."
"Is there any more news?" one of them said, and Gilbert told them of the rumours that had been heard in Holyhead. "They say the Black Watch have been cut to pieces," he said. The whispering stopped.... They could hear the clock's regular tick-tick.... "Oh, the poor men ... the poor men!" an old woman said, and her fingers began to twitch....
And yet, as he had just said in other words, the object of the clock's existence, so far as he knew it, had been already attained. "So far as he knew it!" that was the clause that stuck. "Well, Caw?" said Alan, "what were you going to say?" Caw shook his head. "I haven't knowledge enough to answer either 'yes' or 'no. I have imagined, Mr.
Fleur, leaning out of her window, heard the hall clock's muffled chime of twelve, the tiny splash of a fish, the sudden shaking of an aspen's leaves in the puffs of breeze that rose along the river, the distant rumble of a night train, and time and again the sounds which none can put a name to in the darkness, soft obscure expressions of uncatalogued emotions from man and beast, bird and machine, or, maybe, from departed Forsytes, Darties, Cardigans, taking night strolls back into a world which had once suited their embodied spirits.
"Wound your HEAD too tight, Uncle Jed?" she cried. "Ye-es, yes. I was kind of extra absent-minded yesterday and I thought I wound the clock, but I couldn't have done that 'cause the clock's stopped. Yet I know I wound somethin' and it's just as liable to have been my head as anything else. You listen just back of my starboard ear there and see if I'm tickin' reg'lar."
Out in the mellow night a bird sang from the tip-top of a late-blooming orange tree, and inside, away inside, inside and through and through the poor girl's heart, the "years" which really were nothing but the mantel clock's quarter-hours "crept slowly by." At length she laid her book aside, softly kissed each seated companion, and ascended to her room and window.
"I'd hardly got out of the house," she said in exact imitation of Mrs Weston's voice, "before I met Colonel Boucher. It would have been about three o'clock no it couldn't have been three, because I had got back home and was standing in the hall when it struck three, and my clock's a shade fast if anything.
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