Georgie was filled with enormous
despair till they two met again. They foregathered in the middle
of an endless, hot tropic night, and crept into a huge house that
stood, he knew, somewhere north of the railway-station where the
people ate among the roses. It was surrounded with gardens, all
moist and dripping; and in one room, reached through leagues of
whitewashed passages, a Sick Thing lay in bed. Now the least noise,
Georgie knew, would unchain some waiting horror, and his companion
knew it, too; but when their eyes met across the bed, Georgie was
disgusted to see that she was a child - a little girl in strapped
shoes, with her black hair combed back from her forehead.
"What disgraceful folly!" he thought. "Now she could do nothing
whatever if Its head came off."
Then the Thing coughed, and the ceiling shattered down in plaster
on the mosquito-netting, and "They" rushed in from all quarters.
He dragged the child through the stifling garden, voices chanting
behind them, and they rode the Thirty-Mile Ride under whip and spur
along the sandy beach by the booming sea, till they came to the
downs, the lamp-post, and the brushwood-pile, which was safety.
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