mile.

"How long did it take you?"

The Professor did not move.

"Confound you, can't you answer?" called out Syme, in a sudden anger
that had something like fear underneath. Whether or no the Professor
could answer, he did not.

Syme stood staring back at the stiff face like parchment and the blank,
blue eyes. His first thought was that the Professor had gone mad, but
his second thought was more frightful. After all, what did he know about
this queer creature whom he had heedlessly accepted as a friend? What
did he know, except that the man had been at the anarchist breakfast and
had told him a ridiculous tale? How improbable it was that there
should be another friend there beside Gogol! Was this man's silence a
sensational way of declaring war? Was this adamantine stare after all
only the awful sneer of some threefold traitor, who had turned for the
last time? He stood and strained his ears in this heartless silence.
He almost fancied he could hear dynamiters come to capture him shifting
softly in the corridor outside.

Then his eye strayed downwards, and he burst out laughing. Though the
Professor himself stood there as voiceless as a statue, his five
dumb fingers were dancing alive upon the dead table. Syme watched the
twinkling movements of the talking hand, and read clearly the message--

"I will only talk like this. We must get used to it."

He rapped out the answer with the impatience of relief--

"All right. Let's get out to breakfast."

They took their hats and sticks in silence; but as Syme took his
sword-stick, he held it hard.

They paused for a few minutes only to stuff down coffee and coarse thick
sandwiches at a coffee stall, and then made their way across the river,
which under the grey and growing light looked as desolate as Acheron.
They reached the bottom of the huge block of buildings which they had
seen from across the river, and began in silence to mount the naked and
numberless stone steps, only pausing now and then to make short remarks
on the rail of the banisters. At about every other flight they passed
a window; each window showed them a pale and tragic dawn lifting itself
laboriously over London. From each the innumerable roofs of slate looked
like the leaden surges of a grey, troubled sea after rain. Syme was
increasingly conscious that his new adventure had somehow a quality of
cold sanity worse than the wild adventures of the past. Last night, for
instance, the tall tenements