Читать книгу The Ball of Fire онлайн

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“The topic of debate was money, I believe,” suggested Manning, rescuing his sense of humour from somewhere in his beard. He was the infidel member. “Suppose we return to it. Is Allison’s offer worth considering?”

“Why?” inquired the nasal voice of clean-shaven old Joseph G. Clark, who was sarcastic in money matters. The Standard Cereal Company had attained its colossal dimensions through rebates; and he had invented the device! “The only reason we’d sell to Allison would be that we could get more money than by the normal return from our investment.”

The thinly spun treble note began once more, pulsing its timid way among the high, dim arches, as if seeking a lodgment where it might fasten its tiny thread of harmony, and grow into a masterful composition. A little old lady came slowly down the centre aisle of the nave, in rich but modest black, struggling, against her infirmities, to walk with a trace of the erect gracefulness of her bygone youth. Gail, listening raptly to the delicately increasing throb of the music, followed, in abstraction, the slow progress of the little old lady, who seemed to carry with her, for just a moment, a trace of the solemn hush belonging to that perspective of slender columns which spread their gracefully pointed arches up into the groined twilight, where the music hovered until it could gather strength to burst into full song. The little old lady turned her gaze for an instant to the group in the transept, and subconsciously gave the folds of her veil a touch; then she slipped into her pew, down near the altar, and raised her eyes to the exquisite Henri Dupres crucifix. She knelt, and bowed her forehead on her hands.