ignored
two thousand years of civilisation. It was a harsh, clanging, brazen
note, powerful, uncomplicated, which came jangling in, discordant and
inharmonious with the tune of the age. It savoured of the days when men
fought the brutes with their hands or with their clubs. But also it was
an indication of a force and a power of mind that stopped at nothing to
attain its ends, that chose the shortest cut, the most direct means,
disdainful of hesitation, holding delicacy and finessing in measureless
contempt, rushing straight to its object, driving in, breaking down
resistance, smashing through obstacles with a boundless, crude, blind
Brobdignag power, to oppose which was to be trampled under foot upon the
instant.

It was long before their talk turned from the incident of the morning,
but when it did its subject was Richard Ferriss. Bennett was sounding
his praises and commending upon his pluck and endurance during the
retreat from the ship, when Lloyd, after hesitating once or twice,
asked:

"How is Mr. Ferriss? In your note you said he was ill."

"So he is," he told her, "and I could not have left him if I was not
sure I was doing him harm by staying. But the doctor is to wire me if he
gets any worse, and only if he does. I am to believe that no news is
good news."

But this meeting with Lloyd and the intense excitement of those few
moments by the canal had quite driven from Bennett's mind the fact that
he had _not_ forwarded his present address either to Ferriss or to his
doctor. He had so intended that morning, but all the faculties of his
mind were suddenly concentrated upon another issue. For the moment he
believed that he had actually written to Dr. Pitts, as he had planned,
and when he thought of his intended message at all, thought of it as an
accomplished fact. The matter did not occur to him again.

As he walked by Lloyd's side, listening to her and talking to her,
snapping the whip the while, or flicking the heads from the mullein
stalks by the roadside with its lash, he was thinking how best he might
say to her what he had come from the City to say. To lead up to his
subject, to guide the conversation, to prepare the right psychological
moment skilfully and without apparent effort, were maneuvers in the game
that Bennett ignored and despised. He knew only that he loved her, that
she was there at his side, that the object of all his desires and hopes
was within his reach. Straight as a homing pigeon h