. It shall be your inspiration, it shall lighten your
moments of depression, give you courage when you are in danger; it shall
fill your mind with pride and wonder. It is yours."

Dominey folded it carefully up, crossed the room, unlocked a little safe
and deposited it therein.

"I shall guard it, according to your behest, as my greatest treasure,"
he assured his departing guest, with a fervour which surprised even
himself.

CHAPTER XXVII

There was something dramatic, in the most lurid sense of the word, about
the brief telephone message which Dominey received, not so many hours
later, from Carlton House Terrace. In a few minutes he was moving
through the streets, still familiar yet already curiously changed.
Men and women were going about their business as usual, but an air of
stupefaction was everywhere apparent. Practically every loiterer was
studying a newspaper, every chance acquaintance had stopped to
confer with his fellows. War, alternately the joke and bogey of the
conversationalist, stretched her grey hands over the sunlit city. Even
the lightest-hearted felt a thrill of apprehension at the thought of the
horrors that were to come. In a day or two all this was to be changed.
People went about then counting the Russian millions; the steamroller
fetish was to be evolved. The most peaceful stockbroker or shopkeeper,
who had never even been to a review in his life, could make calculations
of man power with a stump of pencil on the back of an old envelope,
which would convince the greatest pessimist that Germany and Austria
were outnumbered by at least three to one. But on this particular
morning, people were too stunned for calculations. The incredible had
happened. The long-discussed war--the nightmare of the nervous, the
derision of the optimist--had actually materialised. The happy-go-luck
years of peace and plenty had suddenly come to an end. Black tragedy
leaned over the land.

Dominey, avoiding acquaintances as far as possible, his own mind in a
curious turmoil, passed down St. James's Street and along Pall Mall and
presented himself at Carlton House Terrace. Externally, the great
white building, with its rows of flower boxes, showed no signs of undue
perturbation. Inside, however, the anteroom was crowded with callers,
and it was only by the intervention of Terniloff's private secretary,
who was awaiting him, that Dominey was able to reach the inner
sanctum where the Ambassador was busy dictating