Page:Restless Earth.djvu/120

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
RESTLESS EARTH
119

had an uncanny feeling that we were going in the wrong direction, that’s all. Napier is ahead, isn’t it?”

“Dead ahead. We turn to the rlght at the next corner and then to the left, and we’re on the main road.”

“That’s all right, then. Go ahead. I suppose I’m suffering from loss of sleep, too.”

“Feeling all right, now?” asked Roy anxiously.

“Quite all right, thanks.”

The driver seemed doubtful on the point. He let in his clutch with a thoughtful expression, and several times during the remainder of the journey shot watchful glances at the overwrought man beside him.

Harley sat as still as he might in the swaying car, his thoughts upon death. He had forgotten the perfumed romances which were his livelihood. He had forgotten the “voice of the soul,” the “call of like to like, though seas divide”; all the poetic phrases in which he had described telepathy—the “thought transference” of which he had written so much and in which he had no faith.

He did not recognise, in the impulse which had lifted him from the car and had urged his feet to take the southern road, the call of the woman whose soul walked in the blackness of delirium, the soul which cried in the darkness for the man beloved above everything which moved upon the earth or in the heavens above the earth.

The woman lay upon a narrow mattress, her head swathed in brown-stained bandages, while the ambulance which bore her southwards rounded the bends with care and sped along the straights.


CHAPTER XV.

The morning of February 4th, 1932, saw the greatest aggregation of motor vehlcles in one spot in the history of the country.