Читать книгу The Ball of Fire онлайн

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It was still light, though the electric lamps were beginning to flare up through the thin snow veil, when they rounded a rocky drive, and came in view of a little lookout house perched on a hill.

“Oh!” called Gail, involuntarily putting her hand on his arm. “I want to go up there!”

The work of Edward E. Allison was well nigh perfection. He stopped the runabout exactly at the centre of the pathway, and was out and on Gail’s side of the car with the agility of a youngster after a robin’s egg. He helped her to alight, and would have helped her up the hill with great pleasure, but she was too nimble and too eager for that, and was in the lookout house several steps ahead of him.

“It’s glorious,” she said, and her low, melodious voice thrilled him again with that strange quality he had noticed when she had first spoken at the vestry meeting.

Below them lay a grey mist, dotted here and there with haloed lights, which receded in the distance into tiny yellow blurs, while the nearer lamps were swathed in swirling snowflakes. Nearby were ghosts of trees projecting their tops from the misty lake, and out of what seemed a vast eerie depth came the clang of street cars, and the rumble of the distant elevated, and the honks of auto horns, and all the rattle and roar of the great city, muffled and subdued.