Holy Fire
by Ida Alexa Ross Wylie (9780217930116)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill THE BRIDGE ACROSS Like a ghost the liner loomed up slowly through the soaking fog. A tug with the pilot on board put off from her side and ran shorewards puffing noisily with an air of good- humoured self-importance. But its late charge gliding under invisible propulsion up the rain-speckled river had the aloof and tragic look of a fighter who has come back from unspeakable battle. The small fry, dancing on the backwash, eyed her with awe, and the dour, unlovely tramps that lay alongside the quays, with knowledge. They claimed no kinship, but they knew what lay out there beyond the veil of mist and silence. On deck the crew, preoccupied and alert, wormed themselves in and out among the passengers who eddied ineffectually about the companion-ways, shifting their hand luggage from place to place in unappeasable restlessness. A few of them, with upturned collars, stood by the taffrail and watched their appointed landing-place glide nearer to them. They could already see the dock-workers standing by in readiness and a handful of idlers whose apathetic movements proclaimed the recurrence of something wearisomely commonplace. Behind these midget figures the customs and gaunt mast-heads emerged vaguely and with an air of flat and squalid melancholy. And suddenly, in spite of himself, one of the little group on deck broke the silence. "Well, there she is," he said. "There she is at last The old harridan " "Not changed, has she?" " Not a bit." "Good old England " They laughed at that, but quietly and rather grimly as men do who have made a joke at their own expense. Throughout the voyage they had been very silent, but now the barriers were lowered. It was as though the knowledge that in an hour their fellowship would be over and each of them would go his wa...

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