He was twenty miles away at that time. When he left the house he drove rapidly to town, overreaching the slow sabbath groups and the peremptory bells along the broken air.
At midday the weather was dead calm, and after lunch in his cabin Bond had got a peremptory message in a round girlish hand on a sheet of the ship's writing paper.
His first care was given to the child, whose cries, indeed, as she lay writhing on the trundle-bed, made it of peremptory necessity to postpone all other business to the task of soothing her.