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Gone was his joy in life, gone the splendid bird of joy that once used to soar blithely, ecstatically upwards, pouring out song. There were days when, sitting in his room, he had no more feeling of life than the halting tic-tac of the clock in the next room, that seemed to be beating in his own brain.
Harry Gay was claimed by a party of dashing-looking young rakes, who insisted that he should come and play a game of tic-tac with them in the outer room; and as Tom made no move to accompany him, he left him in his seat in the corner to look on and learn all he could. Tom, indeed, was quite fascinated by the scene around him, and had no desire to tear himself away.
As the man spoke he instinctively grasped the two boys, preventing them from continuing their flight. "What's the trouble?" he went on. "I heard a female crying sounding a distress signal like. Where are the burglars? Are you going for the police?" "No, sir. It was us, playing tic-tac," explained Bob, thinking it best to make a clean breast of the affair. "Tic-tac, eh?
She listened in the silence of the night to the ticking of the clock, which seemed to murmur, in its monotonous and regular tic-tac: "It goes, it goes, it goes!" and her heart shrank with such suffering that, with the sheet gripped between her teeth, she groaned in despair. Once, like everyone else, she had some notion of the passing years and of the changes they bring.
The mingled murmur of the loud responses, in those rhythmic phrases, so simple, yet so fervent, almost as if every tenth heartbeat, instead of its dull tic-tac, articulated itself as "Good Lord, deliver us!" the sweet alternation of the two choirs, as their holy song floated from side to side, the keen young voices rising like a flight of singing-birds that passes from one grove to another, carrying its music with it back and forward, why should she not love these gracious outward signs of those inner harmonies which none could deny made beautiful the lives of many of her fellow-worshippers in the humble, yet not inelegant Chapel of Saint Polycarp?
He returned with an entirely new group, and this time there were three automobile fenders and a carnival rattle. When Kennicott again interrupted his shaving, Cy piped, "Naw, you got to give us two dollars," and he got it. A week later Cy rigged a tic-tac to a window of the living-room, and the tattoo out of the darkness frightened Carol into screaming.
On the square at the same instant somebody repeated, "Silence, silence." And it was at once so still that you would have said, there was not a soul there. The commandant read the gazette, his clear voice pronouncing every word with a sort of quaver in it, resembling the tic-tac of our clock in the middle of the night, and it could be distinctly heard in the square.
The greater part of the morning he sat by his niece, soothed by the tic-tac of the machine, which caused a gentle drowsiness, watching the cloth pass under the presser with little jumps, spreading the peculiar chemical scent of new stuffs.
There stood yet the two well-scoured old deal-tables, wrinkled, though, from the protruding fibres of the wood; there were the straw-bottomed stools still; and at the window, Mother Martha's arm-chair, before which, as a child, he had repeated his lessons; there still hung the same little glass between the windows; and the wall-clock above the stove sent forth its tic-tac as fastly as ever.
The captain did not know what a good prophet he was. When Bob came home from school that noon-time he was surprised to see his mother and Captain Spark in earnest conversation. At first Bob thought the mariner might be telling of the escapade of the tic-tac, but when his mother made a warning gesture of silence to Captain Spark on beholding Bob the boy was puzzled.
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