say that the whole world was in a state of cataclysm such as it had hardly, at least not often, known before.
It was his business to watch events, to forecast whither they would lead. He was a Simon Magus of the modern world, with an electric wire and stylographic pen to prophesy with. He of all men could see and realise what was happening all over the globe. He was more alarmed than even the man in the street. This much was certain.
And a day's easy ride away lay the little town which held the acre of rocky ground from which all these horrors, this imminent upheaval, had come.
Again it seemed beyond the power of his brain to seize it all, to contain the vastness of his thoughts.
These facts, which all the world knew, were almost too stupendous for belief. But when he dwelt upon the personal aspect of them he was as a traveller whose way is irrevocably barred by sheer precipice.
At the very first he had been one mouthpiece of the news. For some hours the packet containing it had hung in the dressing-room of a London Turkish bath.
His act had recoiled upon himself, for when Gortre found him in the chambers he was spiritually dying.
Could this suspicion of Schuabe and Llwellyn possibly be true? It had seemed both plausible and probable in Sir Michael's study in London. But out here in the Jaffa roadstead, when he realised—or tried to realise—that on him might depend the salvation of the world. . . . He laughed aloud at that monstrous grandiloquent phrase. He was in the nineteenth century, not the tenth.
He doubted more and more. Had it been any one else it might have been possible to believe. But he could not see himself in this stupendous rôle.
The mental processes became insupportable; he dis-
