to say, Lieutenant Lapenotiere recognised
something of it in this queer old man, in dressing-gown and
ill-fitting wig, who took snuff and interrupted now with a curse and
anon with a "bravo!" as the Secretary read. He was absurd: but he
was no common man, this Lord Barham. He had something of the
ineffable aura of greatness.

But in the Lieutenant's brain, across this serious, even awful sense
of the moment and of its meaning, there played a curious secondary
sense that the moment was not--that what was happening before his
eyes had either happened before or was happening in some vacuum in
which past, present, future and the ordinary divisions of time had
lost their bearings. The great twenty-four-hour clock at the end of
the Board Room, ticking on and on while the Secretary read, wore an
unfamiliar face. . . . Yes, time had gone wrong, somehow: and the
events of the passage home to Falmouth, of the journey up to the
doors of the Admiralty, though they ran on a chain, had no intervals
to be measured by a clock, but followed one another like pictures on
a wall. He saw the long, indigo-coloured swell thrusting the broken
ships shoreward. He felt the wind freshening as it southered and he
left the Fleet behind: he watched their many lanterns as they sank
out of sight, then the glow of flares by the light of which
dead-tired men were repairing damages, cutting away wreckage.
His ship was wallowing heavily now, with the gale after her,--and now
dawn was breaking clean and glorious on the swell off Lizard Point.
A Mount's Bay lugger had spied them, and lying in wait, had sheered
up close alongside, her crew bawling for news. He had not forbidden
his men to call it back, and he could see the fellows' faces now, as
it reached them from the speaking-trumpet: "Great victory--twenty
taken or sunk--Admiral Nelson killed!" They had guessed something,
noting the _Pickle's_ ensign at half-mast: yet as they took in the
purport of the last three words, these honest fishermen had turned
and stared at one another; and without one answering word, the lugger
had been headed straight back to the mainland.

So it had been at Falmouth. A ship entering port has a thousand eyes
upon her, and the _Pickle's_ errand could not be hidden. The news
seemed in some mysterious way to have spread even before he stepped
ashore there on the Market Strand. A small crowd had collected, and,
as he passed through it, many doffed their hats. There