or three million men just anywhere they
choose, and doing pretty well what they like afterwards? By the Saints,
that would be a horrible thing. We've nothing on land that could stand
against them, though, of course, the boys would stand till they fell
down; but fall they would."

"Yes," said Erskine, seriously. "It wouldn't exactly be a walk over for
them, but I'm afraid there couldn't be very much doubt at the end, if
the fleet once went."

"I'm afraid not," replied Castellan, "and we can only hope that our
Lords of the Council will be of the same opinion, or, better still,
that the infernal thing we saw belongs to us."

"I hope so," said Erskine, gravely. "If it doesn't--well, I wouldn't
give half-a-crown for the biggest battleship in the British Navy."

CHAPTER IV

THE SHADOW OF THE TERROR

By a curious coincidence which, as events proved, was to have some
serious consequences, almost at the same moment that Commander Erskine
began to write his report on the strange vision which he and his
Lieutenant had seen, Gilbert Lennard came out of the Observatory which
Mr Ratliffe Parmenter had built on the south of the Whernside Hills in
Yorkshire.

Mr Ratliffe Parmenter had two ambitions in life, one of which he had
fulfilled. This was to pile millions upon millions by any possible
means. As he used to say to his associates in his poorer days, "You've
got to get there somehow, so get there"--and he had "got there." It is
not necessary for the purpose of the present narrative to say how he did
it. He had done it, and that is why he bought the Hill of Whernside and
about a thousand acres around it and built an Observatory on the top
with which, to use his own words, he meant to lick Creation by seeing
further into Creation than anyone else had done, and that is just what
his great reflector had enabled his astronomer to do.

When he had locked the door Lennard looked up to the eastward where the
morning star hung flashing like a huge diamond in splendid solitude
against the brightening background of the sky. His face was the face of
a man who had seen something that he would not like to describe to any
other man. His features were hard set, and there were lines in his face
which time might have drawn twenty or thirty years later. His lips made
a straight line, and his eyes, although he had hardly slept three hours
a night for as many nights, had a look in them that was not to be
accounted for by ordinary ins