II

Percy understood nothing except that he was afraid, as he sat in the
crowded car that whirled him up to London. He scarcely even heard the
talk round him, although it was loud and continuous; and what he heard
meant little to him. He understood only that there had been strange
scenes, that London was said to have gone suddenly mad, that Felsenburgh
had spoken that night in Paul's House.

He was afraid at the way in which be had been treated, and he asked
himself dully again and again what it was that had inspired that
treatment; it seemed that he bad been in the presence of the
supernatural; he was conscious of shivering a little, and of the
symptoms of an intolerable sleepiness. It was scarcely strange to him
that he should be sitting in a crowded car at two o'clock of a summer
dawn.

Thrice the car stopped, and he stared out at the signs of confusion that
were everywhere; at the figures that ran in the twilight between the
tracks, at a couple of wrecked carriages, a tumble of tarpaulins; he
listened mechanically to the hoots and cries that sounded everywhere.

As he stepped out at last on to the platform, he found it very much as
he had left it two hours before. There was the same desperate rush as
the car discharged its load, the same dead body beneath the seat; and
above all, as he ran helplessly behind the crowd, scarcely knowing
whither he ran or why, above him burned the same stupendous message
beneath the clock. Then he found himself in the lift, and a minute later
he was out on the steps behind the station.

There, too, was an astonishing sight. The lamps still burned overhead,
but beyond them lay the first pale streaks of the false dawn. The street
that ran now straight to the old royal palace, uniting there, as at the
centre of a web, with those that came from Westminster, the Mall and
Hyde Park, was one solid pavement of heads. On this side and that rose
up the hotels and "Houses of Joy," the windows all ablaze with light,
solemn and triumphant as if to welcome a king; while far ahead against
the sky stood the monstrous palace outlined in fire, and alight from
within like all other houses within view. The noise was bewildering. It
was impossible to distinguish one sound from another. Voices, horns,
drums, the tramp of a thousand footsteps on the rubber pavements, the
sombre roll of wheels from the station behind--all united in one
overwhelmingly solemn booming, overscored by shriller notes.

It w