Sunday was not the man who would carry himself thus easily without
having, somehow or somewhere, set open his iron trap. Either by
anonymous poison or sudden street accident, by hypnotism or by fire from
hell, Sunday could certainly strike him. If he defied the man he was
probably dead, either struck stiff there in his chair or long afterwards
as by an innocent ailment. If he called in the police promptly, arrested
everyone, told all, and set against them the whole energy of England, he
would probably escape; certainly not otherwise. They were a balconyful
of gentlemen overlooking a bright and busy square; but he felt no
more safe with them than if they had been a boatful of armed pirates
overlooking an empty sea.

There was a second thought that never came to him. It never occurred to
him to be spiritually won over to the enemy. Many moderns, inured to
a weak worship of intellect and force, might have wavered in their
allegiance under this oppression of a great personality. They might have
called Sunday the super-man. If any such creature be conceivable, he
looked, indeed, somewhat like it, with his earth-shaking abstraction,
as of a stone statue walking. He might have been called something above
man, with his large plans, which were too obvious to be detected, with
his large face, which was too frank to be understood. But this was a
kind of modern meanness to which Syme could not sink even in his extreme
morbidity. Like any man, he was coward enough to fear great force; but
he was not quite coward enough to admire it.

The men were eating as they talked, and even in this they were typical.
Dr. Bull and the Marquis ate casually and conventionally of the best
things on the table--cold pheasant or Strasbourg pie. But the Secretary
was a vegetarian, and he spoke earnestly of the projected murder over
half a raw tomato and three quarters of a glass of tepid water. The old
Professor had such slops as suggested a sickening second childhood. And
even in this President Sunday preserved his curious predominance of mere
mass. For he ate like twenty men; he ate incredibly, with a frightful
freshness of appetite, so that it was like watching a sausage factory.
Yet continually, when he had swallowed a dozen crumpets or drunk a quart
of coffee, he would be found with his great head on one side staring at
Syme.

"I have often wondered," said the Marquis, taking a great bite out of a
slice of bread and jam, "whether it wouldn't be b