When he stopped to clear out the chips, the song stopped too, and he
thought of Sabina sitting alone in the vault, propped against the
Aphrodite; and he hoped that she might be asleep. But when he swung
the bar back into position and heard it strike the bricks, the tune
and the words came back with the pendulum rhythm; and went on and on,
till they were almost maddening, though there no longer seemed to be
any sense in them. They made the time pass.
Sabina heard the dull blows, too, though not very loud. It was a
comfort to hear anything in the total darkness, and she tried to amuse
herself by counting the strokes up to a hundred and then checking the
hundreds by turning in one finger after another. It would be something
to tell him when he came back. She wondered whether there would be a
thousand, and then, as she was wondering, she lost the count, and by
way of a change she tried to reckon how many seconds there were in an
hour. But she got into trouble with the ciphers when she tried to
multiply sixty by sixty in her head, and she began counting the
strokes again. They always stopped for a few seconds somewhere between
thirty and forty.
She wished he would come back soon, for she was beginning to feel very
cold again, so cold that presently she got upon her feet and walked a
dozen steps, feeling her way along the great bronze statue.
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