Excerpt:
He paused, struggling with some deep emotion. "We had a nephew," he continued, "my brother and I; the only relative left to us in the world. We loved him as if he had been a son. We saved, invested, and worked solely for him. We are rich, monsieur! Not only have our earnings been large, but we have saved, and invested our savings in safe rents. All, all was to have been his. Aristide was young, clever, and, backed by the fortune we could leave him, would have taken a high place in the world. He had gone to Marseilles on business for us, entrusted with a considerable sum of money. Some friends took him to Monte Carlo—it was only three months ago. He lost this money of ours at the tables—lost it by means of one of the very wheels we had made—and in despair he killed himself, though God knows how gladly we would have forgiven him. We have now completed our last contract for the Administration. We have resigned our position, and for the future others shall make the wheels. We will touch them no more."
"Never again," Charles Carnet echoed his brother, but he looked lovingly at the glittering thing upon the table nevertheless. "No one will make the wheels like us again," he said with a sigh.
The four men, oddly assorted as they were, gathered round the fire once more. There was but little conversation now. They gazed into the glowing heart of coals and wood-blocks, each busily occupied with his own troubled thoughts.
Basil Gregory, warmed and comfortable as he was in body, felt very low in spirits. One of those moments had come to him when life seems a spoilt and futile thing. The future stretched before him in imagination like some great Essex marshland at evening, when the colour fades out of everything, the leaden tides creep inwards from the sea, and the curlews pipe to each other with melancholy voices, like souls sick for love. There was nothing, nothing! A dreary round of ill-paid mechanical duties, a long engagement which would probably never end in marriage, one of the most epoch-making inventions the world could ever know, locked up in his mind and that of his friend, Emile Deschamps.
Thus the thoughts of the poor Englishman, Basil Gregory, as he gazed into the rose-pink and amethyst heart of the fire.
The two old men were sadly remembering the recent loss of the bright-faced boy that had meant everything in their narrow, patient lives.
Sadness lay like a veil upon the faces of all three.
But Emile Deschamps' face was not sad. It was set and rigid. Not a feature of it moved. The brow was wrinkled and knotted with thoughts. There was a fixed and smouldering fire in the eyes. Once Basil looked at his friend and wondered what intense and concentrated thought was burning and glowing in the great executive brain of the Southerner. Had he known, had an inkling of it reached him, he would have leapt to his feet in the wildest excitement he had ever known.
