s instantly confirmed in this resolution when Mrs O'Connor and her
niece came into the room. Never had he seen a more perfect specimen of
the Irishwoman, who is a lady by Nature's own patent of nobility, than
Mrs O'Connor, and, with of course one exception, never had he seen such
a beautiful girl as Norah Castellan.

He was friends with them in half an hour, and inside an hour he had
accepted their invitation to dine and sleep at the house and help them
to get ready for their unexpected journey to the North the next morning.

He went back to the Grand and got his portmanteau and Gladstone bag and
returned to Westbourne Terrace in time for afternoon tea. Meanwhile, he
had bought the early copies of all the evening papers and read up the
condition of things in London, which, in the light of his experiences at
Portsmouth, did not appear to him to be in any way promising. He gave
Norah and her aunt a full, true and particular account of the assault on
Portsmouth, the doings of the _Ithuriel_, the great Fleet action, and
the brilliant _ruse de guerre_ which Admiral Beresford had used to
capture the First French Army Corps that had landed in England--and
landed as prisoners.

The news in the afternoon papers, coupled with what he already knew of
the tactics of the enemy, impressed Lennard so gravely that he succeeded
in persuading Mrs O'Connor and Norah to leave London by the midnight
sleeping-car train from St Pancras for Whernside, since no one knew at
what time during the night John Castellan or his lieutenants might not
order an indiscriminate bombardment of London from the air. He was also
very anxious, for reasons of his own, to get back to his work at the
observatory and make his preparations for the carrying out of an
undertaking compared with which the war, terrible as it was and would
be, could only be considered as the squabblings of children or lunatics.

His task was not one of aggression or conquest, but of salvation, and
the enemy he was going to fight was an invader not of states or
countries, but of a whole world, and unless the assault of this invader
from the outer wilderness of Space were repelled, the result would not
be merely the destruction of ships and fortresses, or the killing of a
few hundreds or thousands of men on the battlefield; it would mean
nothing less than a holocaust which would involve the whole human race,
and the simultaneous annihilation of all that the genius of man had so
laboriou