Too much shaken up by his fall for conversation, Hamerly lay back
against the cushions till we reached his lodgings, but he arrived
there without seeming any worse for the trip. I saw him safely to bed,
promised him an early visit, and left a call for a near-by doctor.
Then I looked at my watch. Barely time to reach Dorothy’s train. “To
Euston. Rush!” I cried to the cabby, and away we sped. Just as the
train came puffing in, I reached the platform, and there was Dorothy’s
dear head leaning from the window of her car. The black old station was
transformed as she stepped lightly to the platform, followed by her
maid. She came towards me with both hands outstretched. “Oh, Jim, it’s
good to see you. Where’s Tom?”
“Down at Folkestone,” I answered. “We’ll join him there as soon as
you’ve had a night’s sleep.”
“Why wait for that?” asked Dorothy energetically. “It’s only twelve
now. We can run down there after lunch. Where are our rooms?”
“At the Savoy,” I said. “Suppose you send your maid up there with the
luggage, and we go up in a hansom.”
It took scarcely ten minutes to load the maid and the luggage in a
four-wheeler and join Dorothy. As we swung out through the gates,
she spoke with a long breath. “It seems good to be back in London
again, even with war so near and with so much ahead of us. Now,
tell me everything that’s happened since you came over to London
from Portsmouth. I got your letter at Queenstown telling about your
experiences on the bottom of the sea. How I wish I could have been
there. But never mind that now. Tell me all you’ve done in the last
four days.”
I settled down to my task. “Tom and I came over safely, as you already
know, from our wire at Queenstown. We decided that ‘the man’ would
be working in the Channel and, after some discussion, settled on
Folkestone as the base from which to work the wave-measuring machine.
We took the apparatus down there three days ago, got a big room and set
it up. I chartered a yacht.”
“What did you do that for?” interrupted Dorothy.
“So we could run down ‘the man’ if he was on the sea. We decided,
coming over, that he was more likely to do his experimenting on water
than on land, and Tom thinks he can get him from his experimental
waves.”
“I see,” said Dorothy. “Go ahead.”
“After chartering the yacht, I helped Tom all I could till last night,
when I came up to London to meet you. Tom expects to get the machine
set up to-day. That’s about all.”
“How is the war progressing?” asked Dorothy. “Everybody on board the
liner was greatly afraid it would begin before we got across, and that
we might be captured, but we reached Liverpool all right.”
“Nothing’s happened yet,” I answered. “But I think it’s coming, may
come any minute. They say that the Emperor has refused to see visitors,
since the Kaiserin Luisa went down, and I think the government expects
war immediately. They’re mobilizing rapidly on both sides.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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