on, but never a voice out of that tomb to reach the world
outside. I shall probably die there." And he smiled as he looked
across the vast green park to the gray horizon.

VIII. THE VENGEANCE OF THE STATUE

It was on the sunny veranda of a seaside hotel, overlooking a
pattern of flower beds and a strip of blue sea, that Horne Fisher
and Harold March had their final explanation, which might be called
an explosion.

Harold March had come to the little table and sat down at it with a
subdued excitement smoldering in his somewhat cloudy and dreamy blue
eyes. In the newspapers which he tossed from him on to the table
there was enough to explain some if not all of his emotion. Public
affairs in every department had reached a crisis. The government
which had stood so long that men were used to it, as they are used
to a hereditary despotism, had begun to be accused of blunders and
even of financial abuses. Some said that the experiment of
attempting to establish a peasantry in the west of England, on the
lines of an early fancy of Horne Fisher's, had resulted in nothing
but dangerous quarrels with more industrial neighbors. There had
been particular complaints of the ill treatment of harmless
foreigners, chiefly Asiatics, who happened to be employed in the new
scientific works constructed on the coast. Indeed, the new Power
which had arisen in Siberia, backed by Japan and other powerful
allies, was inclined to take the matter up in the interests of its
exiled subjects; and there had been wild talk about ambassadors and
ultimatums. But something much more serious, in its personal
interest for March himself, seemed to fill his meeting with his
friend with a mixture of embarrassment and indignation.

Perhaps it increased his annoyance that there was a certain unusual
liveliness about the usually languid figure of Fisher. The ordinary
image of him in March's mind was that of a pallid and bald-browed
gentleman, who seemed to be prematurely old as well as prematurely
bald. He was remembered as a man who expressed the opinions of a
pessimist in the language of a lounger. Even now March could not be
certain whether the change was merely a sort of masquerade of
sunshine, or that effect of clear colors and clean-cut outlines that
is always visible on the parade of a marine resort, relieved against
the blue dado of the sea. But Fisher had a flower in his buttonhole,
and his friend could have sworn he carried his cane with somethi