For a few moments the devil let his hand rest where it lay, gazing at me out of the corners of his eyes, vulgarly triumphant. 🔊

A shudder shook me. 🔊 With an effort I controlled myself and rose from my chair. 🔊 "Very clever," I said condescendingly. 🔊 "But—The Time Machine is a delightful book, don't you think? So entirely original!" 🔊

"You are pleased to sneer," said the devil, who had also risen, "but it is one thing to write about an impossible machine; it is a quite other thing to be a supernatural power." 🔊 All the same, I had scored. 🔊

Berthe had come forth at the sound of our rising. 🔊 I explained to her that Mr. Soames had been called away, and that both he and I would be dining here. 🔊 It was not until I was out in the open air that I began to feel giddy. 🔊 I have but the haziest recollection of what I did, where I wandered, in the glaring sunshine of that endless afternoon. 🔊 I remember the sound of carpenters' hammers all along Piccadilly and the bare chaotic look of the half-erected "stands." 🔊 Was it in the Green Park or in Kensington Gardens or where was it that I sat on a chair beneath a tree, trying to read an evening paper? 🔊 There was a phrase in the leading article that went on repeating itself in my fagged mind: 🔊"Little is hidden from this August Lady full of the garnered wisdom of sixty years of Sovereignty." 🔊 I remember wildly conceiving a letter (to reach Windsor by an express messenger told to await answer): 🔊"Madam: Well knowing that your Majesty is full of the garnered wisdom of sixty years of Sovereignty, I venture to ask your advice in the following delicate matter. 🔊 Mr. Enoch Soames, whose poems you may or may not know—" 🔊 Was there no way of helping him, saving him? 🔊 A bargain was a bargain, and I was the last man to aid or abet any one in wriggling out of a reasonable obligation. 🔊 I wouldn't have lifted a little finger to save Faust. 🔊 But poor Soames! 🔊 Doomed to pay without respite an eternal price for nothing but a fruitless search and a bitter disillusioning. 🔊