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The heart of the little clock on the mantel beat tick-tock, tick-tock; a log crackled and fell between the irons, sending up a shower of evanescent sparks; one of the long windows giving out upon the veranda creaked mysteriously. Karloff was first to break the spell. He made a gesture which was eloquent of his distaste of the situation. "Let us terminate this as quickly as possible," he said.
The confusions of the city's traffic; the winding and unwinding herds that made a picture for the eyes of Erik Dorn, individualize into little human solitudes. The stone houses stand ticking away the years, and within them men and women tick. Doors open and shut, lights go on and off, day and night drop a tick-tock across miles of roofs.
Hands that had nobody behind them; emotion that came without the stabilizing outline of words. So the world stood again on its feet. Tick-tock, said the world to George Hazlitt; and his brain gave an answer, "Tick-tock!" For the paradox of Hazlitt was not that he was a thinker, but a dreamer. His puritanism had put an end to his brain.
For a little while the silence of the room was unbroken, save for the steady tick-tock of a great clock in one corner. Mr. Grimm's eyes were fixed unwaveringly upon those of the chief executive. At last the secretary of war crumpled a sheet of paper impatiently and hitched his chair up to the table. "Coming down to the facts it's like this, isn't it?" he demanded briskly.
He refused to have the cover of the chest lifted until the chest itself was carried carefully out upon the open deck. No sound came from the chest now, if that had been the locality of the tick-tock noise. The vibration could be felt just the same. The men were ordered to stand back and the warrant officer courageously lifted the lid of the chest. Nothing happened.
It was dusk, and the lamp had not yet been lighted. Through the unshaded window Mother Douglas could look out at the first pale stars. The doctor had gone. The house was very quiet, the snapping of the kitchen fire, the steady tick-tock, tick-tock of the old-fashioned clock blending with, rather than breaking, the silence. Mother Douglas closed her eyes.
But once she had kissed another man thus on the mouth, with her body moving, and therein lay a new world a world of flying-haired Mænads and growling satyrs that lived behind the tick-tock of windows. Standing in the snowstorm an insane notion took possession of Hazlitt. It had to do with Evil. Order was an accident. Men and women were evil. The tick-tock was a pretense. The notion passed.
Grandpa brought in the old Seth Thomas, its hands pointing to half-past three. "Tick-tock! Tick-tock!" it said, as contentedly as if it had always lived there. The children went tiptoeing, hobbling, rushing through the clean, bare rooms, their voices echoing as they called back their news. "Gramma, there's a real bathroom!" "Gramma, soon's you feel better you can bake a pie in this gas stove!"
Kittridge, at this hour, was sitting in her clean kitchen, very busily engaged in ripping up a silk dress, which Miss Roxy had engaged to come and make into a new one; and, as she ripped, she cast now and then an eye at the face of a tall, black clock, whose solemn tick-tock was the only sound that could be heard in the kitchen.
He had wasted time enough over retrospection; he determined to occupy himself with the present only. Tick-tock! tick-tock! sang the clocks about him. All at once a volume of musical sounds broke forth; cuckoo-calls, chimes, tinkles light and thin, booms deep and vibrant.
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