e days to come."

He passed on to speak for a few moments about the reconstituted state of
Society, which was his favourite theme, and from that to a peroration
unprepared--fiercely, passionately eloquent. When he had finished
speaking, the air seemed curiously dull and lifeless; an extraordinary
silence, like the silence before a thunderstorm, brooded over the place.
Then the human sea broke its bounds. The smut-blackened trees quivered
with the thunder of their voices. Showers of sparks rose into the air
from the torches they waved. It was a pandemonium of sound. They came
on like a mighty flood, before whose force the dam has suddenly yielded.
The platform was crushed like a nutshell before their onslaught. They
were mad with a great enthusiasm, beside themselves with a passion
stirred only in such men once or twice in a lifetime. The roar of their
voices, as they shouted his name, reached even to the station, to which
Maraton had been smuggled secretly in a fast motor-car--a disappearance
which a great journalist on the next morning alluded to as the one
supremely dramatic touch in a night of wonders. The roar of voices
indeed was still in his ears as he stood before the window of his
compartment, looking out over the fire-hung city with its vaporous
flames, its huge furnaces, its glare which was already becoming fainter.
A myriad lights still twinkled upon the hillsides; the smoke-stained sky
was red with the reflection of those thousand torches. Even as the
train rushed on into the darkness, he could hear the echo of their cry
as they sought for him.

"Maraton! Maraton!"

He threw himself at last into a corner seat of his compartment, and
conscious of a somewhat rare physical exhaustion, he rang the bell for
the attendant and ordered refreshments. The evening papers were by
his side, but he had no fancy to read. The thrill of the last few
hours was still upon him. He sat with folded arms, looking idly through
the window at the chaotic prospect. Suddenly he was aware that the door
of his compartment had been opened. A man had entered and was taking
the seat opposite to him, a man whose appearance struck Maraton at once
as being vaguely familiar, a man who smiled at him almost with the air
of an old acquaintance.

"You don't recognise me, I can see," the newcomer said, smiling
slightly, "yet we ought to know one another."

Maraton looked at the intruder curiously. It was, in many respects, a
remarkable face; a