Torchlight!
Fireworks from the cranes! It'll tickle old Pilgrim to death. I shall
have a marquee with matchboarding sides fixed up inside, and heat
it with a few of those smokeless stoves. We can easily lay on
electricity. It will be absolutely the most sensational stone-laying
that ever was. It'll be in all the papers all over the blessed world.
Think of it! Torches! Fireworks from the cranes!... But I won't change
the day--neither for Miss April nor anybody else."
Mr. Marrier dissolved in laudations.
"Well," Edward Henry agreed with false diffidence. "It'll knock spots
off some of 'em in this town!"
He felt that he had snatched victory out of defeat. But the next
moment he was capable of feeling that Elsie April had defeated
him even in his victory. Anyhow, she was a most disconcerting and
fancy-monopolizing creature.
There was one source of unsullied gratification, he had shaved off his
beard.
VI
"Come up here, Sir John," Edward Henry called. "You'll see better, and
you'll be out of the crowd. And I'll show you something."
He stood, in a fur coat, at the top of a short flight of
rough-surfaced steps between two unplastered walls--a staircase which
ultimately was to form part of an emergency exit from the dress-circle
of the Regent Theatre. Sir John Pilgrim, also in a fur coat, stood
near the bottom of the steps, with the glare of a Wells light full on
him and throwing his shadow almost up to Edward Henry's feet.
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