t's to stop him taking one of
those infernal things of his up to Whernside, wrecking the house and the
observatory, and taking her off with him to the uttermost ends of the
earth if he likes?

"There must be something in it or that shell would not have dropped just
after I got outside the station. They watched the train come in, and
they knew I was in it--they must have known.

"What a ghastly catastrophe it would be if they got on to that scheme of
ours at the pit. Fancy one of those aerial torpedoes of his dropping
down the bore of the cannon a few minutes before the right time! It
would mean everything lost, and nothing gained, not even for him.

"Ah, good man Erskine," he went on, as he opened the paper, and read
that every cruiser, battleship and transport that had forced the
entrance to the Thames and Medway had been sunk. "That will be a bit of
a check for them, anyhow. Yes, yes, that's very good. Garrison Fort,
Chatham and Tilbury, of course, destroyed from the air, but not a ship
nor a man left to go and take possession of them."

While he was reading his paper, and muttering thus to himself, the cab
was tearing at the horse's best speed down Gray's Inn Road. It took a
sudden swing to the right into Holborn, ran along New Oxford Street, and
turned down Charing Cross Road, the horse going at a full gallop the
whole time.

Happily it was a good horse, or the fate of the world might have been
different. There was no rule of the road now, and no rules against
furious driving. London was panic-stricken, as it might well be. As far
as Lennard could judge the aerial torpedoes were being dropped mostly in
the neighbourhood of Regent Street and Piccadilly, and about Grosvenor
Place and Park Lane. He half expected to find Parliament Street and
Westminster in ruins, but for some mysterious reason they had been
spared.

The great City was blazing in twenty places, and scarcely a minute
passed without the crash of an explosion and the roar of flame that
followed it, but a magic circle seemed to have been drawn round
Westminster. There nothing was touched, and yet the wharves on the other
side of the river, and the great manufactories behind them, were blazing
and vomiting clouds of flame and smoke towards the clouds as though the
earth had been split open beneath them and the internal fires themselves
let loose.

When the cabman pulled up his sweating and panting horse at the door of
Number 2 Downing Street, Lennar