The blinds, however, had been carefully lowered, and
nothing of the interior was revealed save the fact that a light burned
within. In the entire quadrangle, round which, tier above tier, hundreds
of people were silent in sleep or in vigil, this was the sole
illumination. Hugo leaned over the balcony, and tried to pierce the
depths of the vast pit below, and those thoughts came to him which come
to watchers by night in the presence of sleeping armies, or on the high
sea. The eternal and insoluble question troubled and teased him, and
would not be put aside. In imagination, he felt the very swish of the
planet as it whirled through space with its cargo of pitiful humanity.
What, after all, were life, love, ambition, grief, death? What, in the
incessant march of suns, could be the value of a few restless specks of
vitality clinging with desperation to a minor orb?
And then he fancied he could hear a sound within the flat, and he forgot
these transcendental speculations, and for him the secret of the
universe lay behind the blinds of Francis Tudor's drawing-room. Yes, he
could hear a sound. It was the distant sound of a man talking--loudly,
slowly, and distinctly--but too far off for him to catch even one word.
He guessed, as he pushed the window a little wider open, and bent his
ear to the aperture, that the voice must be in a room beyond the
drawing-room.
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