efence had been slowly,
and at a tremendous sacrifice of life on both sides, forced back from
line after line, and position after position, into the city itself;
his batteries were raining their hail of shot and shell from the
heights round London, and his aerostats were hurling ruin from the
sky upon the crowded millions locked up in the beleaguered space; and
yet the man who had presumed to tell him that the hour in which he
set foot on British soil would be the last of his Empire, had done
absolutely nothing to interrupt the march of conquest.

From this it will be seen that Alexander Romanoff was at least as
completely in the dark as to the possible course of the events of the
near future as was the King of England himself, shut up in his
capital, and cut off from all communication from the rest of the
world.

On the morning of the 29th of November there was held at the Prime
Minister's rooms in Downing Street a Cabinet Council, presided over
by the King in person. After the Council had remained for about an
hour in earnest consultation, a stranger was admitted to the room in
which they were sitting.

The reader would have recognised him in a moment as Maurice Colston,
otherwise Alexis Mazanoff, for he was dressed almost exactly as he
had been on that memorable night, just thirteen months before, when
he made the acquaintance of Richard Arnold on the Thames Embankment.

Well-dressed, well-fed, and perfectly at ease, he entered the Council
Chamber without any aggressive assumption, but still with the quiet
confidence of a man who knows that he is practically master of the
situation. How he had even got into London, beleaguered as it was on
every side in such fashion that no one could get out of it without
being seen and shot by the besiegers, was a mystery; but how he could
have in his possession, as he had, a despatch dated thirty-six hours
previously in New York was a still deeper mystery; and upon neither
of these points did he make the slightest attempt to enlighten the
members of the British Cabinet.

All that he said was that he was the bearer of a message from the
President of the Anglo-Saxon Federation in America, and that he was
instructed to return that night to New York with such answer as the
British Government might think fit to make to it. It was this message
that had been the subject of the deliberations of the Council before
his admission, and its net effect was as follows.

It was now practic