He struck her sharply across the nose,
and, jumping aboard, thrust off from the shore.
In telling Miss Marty that the town was deserted, Cai Tamblyn had
forgotten the Vicar.
That good man, it is perhaps superfluous to say, had not sought his
bed. He was a widower, and had no one to dissuade him from keeping
vigil until daybreak. At ten o'clock, therefore, having seen to the
trimming of his lamp and dismissed the servants to rest, he lit his
study fire, set the kettle upon it, and having mixed himself a bowl
of brandy-punch (in the concoction of which all Troy acknowledged him
to be an expert), drew his arm-chair close to the genial blaze, and
sat alternately sipping his brew and conning for the thousandth time
the annotated pamphlet in which he had demonstrated exhaustively,
redundantly, irrefutably, beyond possibility of disbelief or doubt,
that with the morrow the world's great age must be renewed and the
Millennium dawn upon earth.
For an hour and a half, or maybe three-quarters, he sat reading and
reassuring himself that the armour of his proof was indeed
proof-armour and exposed no chink to assault; and then--
The Vicar was a man of clean conscience and regular habits.
He closed his eyes to review the argument. By and by his chin
dropped forward on his chest. He slept. He dreamt. His dreams were
formless, uneasy; such as one might expect who deserts his bed and
his course of habit to sleep upright in an arm-chair.
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