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The old clock that Marmaduke Storr made in London more than a hundred years ago was clicking the steady pulse-beats of its second century.
There are people who have a penchant for cities more than that, a talent for them, a gift of sensing them, of feeling their rhythm and pulse-beats, as others have a highly developed music sense, or color reaction. It is a thing that cannot be acquired. In Fanny Brandeis there was this abnormal response to the color and tone of any city.
And she could not turn her fascinated gaze or crush out the swelling tenderness that closed her throat to speech and set her eyes glimmering. The lids closed, slowly; she leaned there without a word, living through in the space of a dozen pulse-beats, the agony and sweetness of the past; then laid her flushed cheek on her arms and opened her eyes, looking at him in silence.
So he waited, straining to cheat that opaque pall of night of one little hint as to his whereabouts who had removed the light. Resurrecting another old trick, he measured time by pulse-beats, and stood unstirring and all but breathless for three full minutes. But perceptions stimulated to extra sensibility by apprehension of danger detected nothing.
My uncle was breathing heavily. "Count it," said he, feebly extending his hand. Rayel counted his pulse-beats. "Ninety-four, and growing quicker!" he exclaimed, turning toward me with a frightened look. "It won't increase much," my uncle whispered, feebly, but with a cool and professional air. "It will go down soon, and then death will follow."
His quickened pulse-beats prevented him from realizing the enormity of the proposed transaction, but he knew that he ought to be indignant. What a pity it was that Gulmore had made no proposal which he might have accepted and then disclosed! "If I understand you, you propose that I should take up this contract, and make money out of it.
I cannot compromise your collective wisdom. If I have strained the truth one hair's breadth for the sake of an epigram or an antithesis, you are accustomed to count the normal pulse-beats of sound judgment, and know full well how to recognize the fever-throbs of conceit and the nervous palpitations of rhetoric.
It dit not disturb the silence, in which one could almost hear pulse-beats. It belonged to another world. Once Alymer raised his head and looked hard into her face. In his eyes there was an expression of utter hopelessness.
"The pulse-beats of a man are separated by intervals of a second," he thought, "and by counting my pulse I can determine the interval between the rumbling, and thus gain some idea of the passing hours." He was about to put this plan into practice when a sudden cry escaped him: "Good God!" In the blackness of his cell a thin shaft of light appeared.
His ears listened mechanically to the steady pulse-beats of the propeller; his eyes swept the vague plain of the ocean for the sparkling white diamond that would betoken a mast-head light; he was watchful and prepared for any unforeseen emergency that might beset the vessel intrusted to his care.
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