The
opportunity which he had so often longed for had come. And as he hurried
along through the gathering fog he repeated and repeated a fragment of
the recent conversation between the man who was now dead, and
himself--who remained very much alive.
"You haven't shown it to anybody else?" Pratt had asked.
"Neither shown it to anybody, nor mentioned it to a soul," Antony Bartle
had answered. So, in all that great town of Barford, he, Linford Pratt,
he, alone out of a quarter of a million people, knew--what? The
magnitude of what he knew not only amazed but exhilarated him. There
were such possibilities for himself in that knowledge. He wanted to be
alone, to think out those possibilities; to reckon up what they came to.
Of one thing he was already certain--they should be, must be, turned to
his own advantage.
It was past eight o'clock before Pratt was able to go home to his
lodgings. His landlady, meeting him in the hall, hoped that his dinner
would not be spoiled: Pratt, who relied greatly on his dinner as his one
great meal of the day, replied that he fervently hoped it wasn't, but
that if it was it couldn't be helped, this time. For once he was
thinking of something else than his dinner--as for his engagement for
that evening, he had already thrown it over: he wanted to give all his
energies and thoughts and time to his secret.
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