heeled over slightly. One of the four or five motorboats had rubbed along the wall as the tide ebbed, and was held in the angle of the nearer bridge.
Warehouses and other buildings beyond the river were forbidding masses that added to the gloom of the water and hid all but a few mud-gleams, here and there.
Penderby was sorry for having come. The scene was the most mournful the dead city had shown him. But he would not go back to the hotel yet. Approach of night seemed to have sharpened his senses, and the early-afternoon restlessness had returned.
A body lay sixty or seventy yards away, in the direction of Trafalgar Square. It was the only one in sight. The spread-eagled symmetry of it stirred his curiosity, and he walked quickly toward it. But something held him back, and his pace became slow, then very slow. And then he was trembling.
He stooped over the body. Recognition came without a shock. He was looking at Edward Penderby, lanky, ill-shaven, in ragged clothes. But the eyes, wide open, were quiet, and the lines beside the mouth had softened.
The man who had lived dropped on one knee, and touched the angular forehead with an objective pity.
"So you went, too," he said.
*****
There still were some traces of what had been London when life came back to the earth; green, creeper-tied heaps of concrete and steel, for instance, and flooded steel vaults beneath banks, and a few big guns in arsenals, and presses, now in rust, under Fleet Street ruins. Rain, wind, heat, and cold had seen to the rest, and the two bodies—one well-dressed, the other shabbily—on a street beside the Thames had been dust many a year.
