Sixty Days to Live

The other school consisted of those fatalists who were thronging the public-houses, determined to follow the old exhortation, 'Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.' Many of them were already drunk and some were dancing with the women on the pavements.

Slowly Derek edged the car down as far as Trafalgar Square, where more meetings were in progress. Whitehall had been closed so the Square was packed with humanity and the car was once more turned back by the police.

'We could get into Piccadilly via Leicester Square,' Derek suggested, 'then I think we'd better go home. After nightfall the streets will be more crowded than ever, and even if the police don't close them to traffic, I don't want to take the risk of running down a drunk.'

'Oh, don't let's go home yet,' Lavina cried. 'I want to see things.'

'I tell you,' exclaimed Roy, 'what about the cause of all the trouble—the old comet? Sunset should be in about an hour and it's only for a short spell after sundown that one can see it.'

'There's not much chance of our seeing anything of it from central London,' remarked Derek.

'What about running up to Hampstead Heath, though? We'd get a splendid view from there.'

'Yes, let's!' cried Lavina enthusiastically.

Derek had already turned the car round. Yard by yard they crawled up St. Martin's Lane, across Oxford Street and along Tottenham Court Road. It took them over half an hour to get as far as the Euston Road but once they had crossed it the drifting crowds no longer overflowed into the roadway. Derek was able to put on speed and another ten minutes brought them to the south-east corner of Hampstead Heath.

Here they parked the car and set out along the track past the ponds, up Parliament Hill. Quite a crowd of people were moving in the same direction and several thousand more were already massed up there on the highest spot overlooking London.

Mingling with the crowd, they managed to find a place well up the slope from which they could gaze across the million roof-tops of the mighty city. Right across the valley on another hill-top in the distant south-east, the two towers of the Crystal Palace were faintly discernible. More to the south the dome of St. Paul's and the tower of Big Ben stood out clearly; while to the south-west rose the twin chimneys of Battersea Power Station.

But no one was now interested in picking out these famous landmarks. They were all gazing westward into the setting sun. Most of them had smoked glasses or pieces of coloured mica to prevent the glare hurting their eyes and, apparently oblivious of the fact that they possibly had only three days to live, hawkers were moving among the crowd doing a brisk business in such wares.

Derek bought three pairs of cheap smoked glasses for Lavina, Roy and himself, then they settled down on the grass to watch the heavenly phenomenon which threatened the doom of the world.

The comet was only three degrees in elevation above the sun and a little to its left; so, even through smoked glasses, it was difficult to get any clear impression of it while daylight lasted. But the menace in the heavens at least appeared to have brought a spell of exceptionally fine weather. The sky was cloudless and the opportunity for getting a good view of the comet remarkable for London.

The sun sank like a great yellow ball behind the horizon and, normally, twilight would have followed, lasting about an hour, until darkness supervened and the stars came out. But now a dull yellow-orange light became slowly perceptible above the spot where the sun had gone down. The light grew in strength until it suffused the whole scene, changing it weirdly, and the multitude were able to gaze their fill upon the concentrated blotch in the heavens from which it came.

The comet was now far bigger than any star and had a dia* meter about one-fifth of that of the moon. But, unlike the moon, it had no clear-cut edge or cold brilliance.

Even seen through smoked glasses it had no regular outline but wobbled slightly, having the appearance of a large red nebula; a ball of fire that twinkled fiercely.

Daylight had gone, yet the Heath, the great crowd upon it, and the nearer portion of the city below were still clearly visible; but as an eerie landscape bathed in a strange, baleful, reddish light. The sight was most uncanny and the evil radiance seemed to affect the crowd on the hillside in an alarming manner.

A woman near Derek began to laugh hysterically. Another began to sob. The eyes of the men glinted strangely. A great wave of excitement suddenly seemed to surge right through the watching thousands. In a moment, from stillness the whole human mass began to pulse with a weird, unnatural life.

A great murmur went up. A mingling of shouts and wild laughter. Two men just in front of Lavina began to fight. Another suddenly thrust his way through the crush towards a pretty girl, seized her in his arms and, in spite of her struggles, began to kiss her avidly.

Derek felt an overpowering desire to do the same to Lavina. He was standing just behind her and his arms positively ached to reach out and draw her to him. He fought it down, but suddenly she swung right round and flung her arms about his neck,

For a good minute their mouths were locked together; then, with a little moan, she wrenched her head away and began to hammer on his shoulders with her fists.

Roy had pulled a large flask of whisky out of his hip-pocket and was gulping down its contents as though they were only water.

The baleful rays from the big splodge of reddish-yellow light near the western horizon seemed to have raised the basest passions of the whole multitude. Parliament Hill was now a scene of indescribable confusion. People were fighting, kissing, struggling, rolling on the ground either in the grip of uncontrollable hate or passionate desire.

The comet set twelve minutes after the sun. With its disappearance the shouting died. The red glow faded, giving place to a pink-twinged twilight sky.

People were now coming to their senses as quickly as they had lost them ten minutes earlier. They were apologising to each other on every side and helping their late antagonists up from the ground. Almost at once the great crowd began to disperse, moving down the hill's sides to the roads that led into London.

Derek took Lavina's arm. 'Come on,' he said gruffly, 'let's get back to the car. What happened to us all, God knows! For a few minutes we must have been out of our senses.'

Lavina put a hand over her eyes. 'Extraordinary, wasn't it. The thing seemed to exercise a malign influence on everybody. But we aren't responsible; we only behaved like all the rest.'

Roy followed them, lurching slightly. His breath was coming fast and his eyes were bulging a little from the amount of neat spirit he had consumed in gulp after gulp.

'That's all very well,' he muttered. 'But if it can do that sort of thing to us now, what effect is it going to have on us in a day or two's time, when it gets a bit nearer?'

'Eat, Drink and be Merry . .

Distinctly sobered by this strange experience they regained the car and drove back towards London. Derek took the quieter streets and as they were passing through St. John's Wood Lavina broke a long silence by saying:

'Where are you heading for now?'

'Back to St. James's Square,' Derek replied promptly. 'Surely you've seen enough for one night, haven't you?'

'Yes. But I was thinking of dinner. Where are we going to feed?'

'Oh, we'll knock up something.'

'Why should we, when the restaurants are still open? It's getting on for ten o'clock and I feel extraordinarily hungry. Let's stop on the way back and get something to eat somewhere.'

'All right,' he conceded, a trifle reluctantly. 'Where would you like to go?'

'Let's try the Dorchester. We can get there without going through the most crowded parts of the West End.'

'We'll have to cross Oxford Street.'

'We'd have to do that anyway, unless we go right round Hyde Park, via Notting Hill and Kensington.'

'That's true. And I can avoid Marble Arch by going down Park Street. The Dorchester let it be then.'

'That's O.K. by me,' Roy muttered from the back, 'as long as one of you has enough cash to pay for the feast. I'm stony.'

Derek smiled. 'The meal, if we can get one, is on me. I drew fifty quid out of the bank last week in case of emergencies.'

At Baker Street they came into the crowds again so Derek turned right, into Gloucester Place, then back through Port-man Square into Orchard Street. They were hung up for a quarter of an hour at the Oxford Street crossing and in the

distance could see masses of people jamming the roadway right up to Marble Arch. But the crowd was good-tempered and eventually they managed to get through; reaching Park Lane at last, and their destination, by way of Deanery Street.

To their surprise, they found the Dorchester packed to the doors. The lounge was as crowded as a railway terminus before a Bank Holiday week-end, and waiters were having difficulty in securing a passage through the crush to bring drinks to those people who had been fortunate enough to obtain tables.

Every table in the Grill Room was also taken but the head waiter, who was standing in the doorway, recognised Lavina.

'You seem to be doing marvellous business,' she smiled at him.

He gave her a worried look. 'It is not good, madame. Many of our waiters have failed to report for duty and many of the kitchen staff are also gone; yet we have to cope with all these people. And we do not like this crowd. Very few of them are our usual patrons and they make unpleasantness for the guests who are still staying in the hotel.'

'We were hoping to get some supper here,' she said, "but it looks as though that's impossible.'

'In the Grill, yes, madame,' he spread out his hands, 'but I may be able to get you a table in the Restaurant.'

'But we're not changed.'

He shrugged. 'Temporarily, that rule is no more. People made us withdraw it when they overflowed from the Grill, and old customers like yourself we could not refuse.'

Turning, he forced a way for them through the press and as there was not a single table vacant in the Restaurant he had one set up on the already diminished dance-floor.

They were lucky in getting a bottle of champagne almost at once, but it was a good half hour before the caviare rolled in smoked salmon, which they had ordered as a first course, appeared; and during their wait they had plenty of time to study the people about them.

It was quite clear that very few of them frequented the Dorchester in normal times. Only a handful were in evening dress. Many of the women were exotic-looking ladies, obviously from the streets round Piccadilly, and the bulk of the men were flashily-dressed foreigners of the type that usually haunt the Soho bars.

At nearly every table people were drinking champagne but, although appearances are often deceptive, something about the types which formed many of the groups made Derek wonder vaguely if they meant to pay for it or would try and slip away before their bills were brought to them. He wished now that he had insisted on taking Lavina straight back to St. James's Square, but she was in excellent form and Roy, his rather weak but attractive face wreathed in smiles, was entertaining her with a series of limericks in Pidgin-English which he had brought back from China.

The band, reduced to half its usual number, was doing its best but it was almost drowned in the babel of voices. The dance-floor was crowded with a solid mass of perspiring humanity. One look round the great room was enough to see that the people in it were the very antithesis of those who were praying in the churches. They typified the wilder elements of the Metropolis whom the possibility of being struck down in three days' time had released from all normal restraint. Their set faces and harsh laughter suggested a fierce determination to get everything possible out of life while it was still in them.

Perhaps as a result of their recent experience on Hampstead Heath Lavina and her two escorts found themselves unusually thirsty. Between the three of them their bottle of champagne was finished before their hors-d'oeuvres arrived, and Derek ordered another.

Twenty minutes went by but it did not appear, and Roy was grumbling about the delay when a big man with a bald head and bushy eyebrows, who was wearing a horse-shoe tie-pin in a striped cravat, leant across from the next table proffering a magnum.

'Here, have some of ours, old boy, till yours turns up,' he leered. 'It's all on the house tonight so what's the odds?'

Roy held out his glass at once and Derek, although he would have liked to refuse, followed suit because the big man looked as if he might resent a refusal and it would have been the height of folly to start a row at such a time on a point of ethics.

'And some for the little lady,' said their new acquaintance.

When Lavina's glass was full the big man picked up his own.

'Well, here's to you all! Happy days and three nights of bliss before the old comet hits us!' He gave a special smirk in Lavina's direction.

As they were about to drink, a Spanish-looking woman at his table irritably claimed his attention so for the moment they were relieved of his advances.

In spite of the crush Lavina wanted to dance, so Derek took her on to the floor; but when they returned to their table neither their second course nor the second bottle of wine had appeared and it seemed, on looking round the room, that the waiters had given up the unequal struggle.

'It's nearly half-past eleven,' Derek remarked, 'and it doesn't look as though we're going to get our omelette. I think we'd better go home.'

'Don't be silly,' Lavina shrugged. She was staring out under lowered lids, over the cigarette she was constantly puffing, at the jammed mass of dancers. 'I'm enjoying myself watching all these queer people.'

'Maybe, but things are going to get pretty tough here soon, unless I'm much mistaken.'

'Well, I'm not going,' she said, with sudden firmness. 'It's just like a gala night, only the most extraordinary one I've ever seen.'

At that moment a man in a check suit pushed his way past their table. He was carrying four bottles of champagne in his hands and others were wedged under his arm-pits.

'By jove!' exclaimed Roy. 'That chap's been raiding the cellars. I'm in on this. Hang on here, and I'll get a few bottles.'

'You can't do that,' Derek protested.

'Why not?' Roy got to his feet. 'If the waiters won't serve us, why shouldn't we help ourselves?' He left them abruptly.

That he was right in his surmise that looting had started was soon clear as other men in lounge suits, quite obviously not employed by the hotel, came thrusting their way through the crowded entrance of the Restaurant clutching bottles of champagne, brandy and whisky.

The new supplies of drink were soon in circulation and gave an added fillip to the already irresponsible assembly. Someone else had thought of raiding the hotel's supply of carnival favours. Coloured streamers, balloons and puff-balls began to be thrown from table to table; paper hats appeared on the heads of the dancers; tin whistles and klaxon horns were thrown from hand to hand and added their noise to the already incredible din.

Roy returned flushed and laughing, with a couple of magnums of Louis Roederer. He gave one to the big man with the horse-shoe tie-pin at the next table and opened up the other for his own party.

'You should just see the crowd in the cellar,' he grinned. 'This little beano's going to cost the hotel a packet. Some of the chaps down there are too tight to move already and others are sitting on the floor lapping it up out of the bottles.'

Derek stood up. 'Come on, Lavina, I've had enough of this. I'm going to take you home.'

'Don't be an idiot, darling!' She smiled serenely. 'I've already told you I'm thoroughly enjoying myself.'

A few tables away a man had a girl pulled back across his chest and was kissing her neck. At another, two men were attempting to fight, while a flaxen-haired young woman screamed drunken curses at them as she endeavoured to pull them apart.

Lavina could see perfectly well what was going on around her and knew that she ought not to remain there any longer; but she was now a little tight herself and in one of her pigheaded moods in which she was capable of almost any folly rather than submit to anyone else's dictation.

'Come on,' said Derek. 'If we stay here, we'll get mixed up in some rough-house or other.'

She impatiently shook off the hand he had laid on her arm, and stood up. 'I'm not going I tell you. Let's dance.'

'No,' he said firmly. 'I'm taking you home.'

'All right. I'll dance with Roy, then.' She swung round and held out her arms to her cousin.

Roy was a little unsteady on his legs from the considerable amount of whisky and champagne he had consumed and his mouth hung slackly open, but he pulled himself together. Before Derek could say anything further, the two of them had glided off together into the crush.

Derek wished now that he had begged Lavina to come home instead of trying to order her to do so, and determined to try persuasive methods directly she got back to the table. In the meantime, he followed her golden head with an anxious eye as far as he could among the bobbing jam of people.

She and Roy had very nearly completed the circuit of the restricted dance-floor three times—but were hidden from Derek for the moment—when a dark-complexioned, tight-lipped man jumped up from a table and laid a sinewy hand on her shoulder.

'I want to dance with you,' he said. 'My name's Finnigan and any of the boys'll tell you that I'm an ace-high picker of good-looking women.'

Lavina met his insolent stare with a glance that would have shrivelled most men, but it had no effect whatever on the forceful Mr. Finnigan, With his left hand he gave Roy a violent push in the chest and with his right he wrenched Lavina round to face him.

'Take your hands off me,' she snapped, white with rage; but Finnigan only grinned at her.

'I like a girl with spirit,' he said, and, grabbing her small waist, jerked her to him.

She was not in the least frightened, but absolutely berserk with rage. Her eyes became hooded—mere slits in her pale little face—and the corners of her small mouth turned right down at a sharp angle. Raising her right hand she smacked Mr. Finnigan with all her force across the face.

As he jerked back, surprise gave place to black anger in his dark eyes; but before he could do anything further Roy had recovered and hit him an ineffectual blow which grazed his cheek.

In a second, Finnigan braced himself, swung round, and struck out with deadly precision. His fist took Roy under the chin and he went sprawling to the floor among the dancers.

Someone laughed hysterically, a woman screamed, but Finnigan took no notice. Completely unruffled, he turned back to Lavina and said smoothly:

'Now that's settled, we're going to dance, and I'll teach you how to smack people a bit later on this evening.'

As Finnigan grabbed her again she looked wildly round for Derek but could not see him. Then, on her right, she suddenly caught sight of the big bald man with the horse-shoe tie-pin.

'Half a minute! What's all this?' he exclaimed, advancing on Finnigan.

'You keep out of this, Harris, or I'll put my boys on to you,' snapped the Irishman. 'This little floosie's my pigeon.'

'Oh, no, she's not,' declared Harris. 'As for the boys, there's plenty of mine here, too.'

Finnigan still had hold of Lavina by one wrist but Harris put an arm round her shoulders from behind. Pulling her to him he gave her a sloppy, wet kiss which landed under her right ear.

'Oh, no, she's not,' he repeated. 'We're acquainted already —been neighbours all the evening. I've only been waiting my chance to have a dance with her until the party got going.'

'Stop it, both of you!' Lavina's voice came hoarse and unnatural. 'Let me go! I don't want anything to do with either of you.'

So many quarrels over women were now taking place that the squabble for Lavina had passed almost unnoticed. Everything had happened so quickly that Roy was still sitting on the floor dazedly fingering his injured chin, while the dancers continued to jig all about them.

Suddenly Finnigan released Lavina's wrist, thrust his hand under his arm-pit and withdrew it clutching a razor; the sharp edge uppermost across the back of his knuckles.

He made one slash at Harris but the big man was extraordinarily agile. Thrusting Lavina aside, he ducked; and next second he had also whipped out a razor.

Both men began to shout at the top of their voices and almost immediately their respective adherents came charging through the crowd towards them.

Within a moment a gang battle was in full progress. The dance-floor became a scene of wild confusion. Screaming women fought their way from it between the nearest tables. Bottles and glasses were being hurled; blood was flowing from ugly razor slashes. Lavina missed one right across her face only by inches and another in the neck because she tripped and fell.

Derek had jumped to his feet directly the shouting started. Using his elbows indiscriminately on men and women, he forced his way forward until he saw Lavina. As the floor cleared of non-combatants he made better progress and began to hit out savagely at any of the men who barred his path.

Roy had staggered to his feet again but he was still half dazed. Harris and his men were getting the best of the battle. Finnigan and his boys were being driven back. Derek was still some distance off, fighting with a fleshy, hook-nosed Jew.

In a gallant attempt to save Lavina, Roy plunged into the whirling melee. In doing so, he blundered into Finnigan from behind and threw him off his balance. With a blasphemous curse the Irishman fell to the floor.

Stooping, Roy grabbed Lavina and dragged her to her feet. Finnigan was up again, but in his fall he had dropped his razor. Reaching behind him, he snatched up an empty champagne bottle, and, raising it aloft, he brought it down with all his strength on the back of Roy's head.

At that moment Derek reached them. As the blow fell he lashed out with all his force and, catching Finnigan full under the jaw, sent him flying backwards among the tables.

Whipping round, Derek stared at Lavina. She was kneeling again now and held Roy in her arms. The whole of the back of his head was shattered and blood was pouring from it all over her light summer frock.

The melee of gangsters had swayed away from them. Derek knelt down beside her and saw that she was weeping hysterically.

'He's dead,' she moaned. 'He's dead. And it's all my fault. Oh, how wicked I was to insist on staying here.'

A fresh din of shouting was now coming from the lounge outside. A moment before, the Restaurant doors had been jammed by a solid mass of people trying to escape from the gangsters' razors. Now they had turned and were streaming back into the room, yelling as they came: 'The Police! The Police!'

Derek realised at once that the hotel management had at last succeeded in getting aid from the authorities to clear the place. One drunken man was lying on the floor nearby, apparently oblivious to all that was going on except for the presence of the equally drunken woman in his arms over whom he was slobbering. But others, wounded, unconscious, dead, were strewn about the floor among the broken glass. The rest were clambering over the chairs and tables in a desperate attempt to escape by way of the windows.

A phalanx of police, pressed shoulder to shoulder, burst their way through the crowd in the doorway. Their batons were drawn and they were in no mood to be trifled with. Several had lost their helmets and others had cuts upon their faces from missiles that had been thrown at them as they had fought their way through the hall.

For a moment Derek thought of trying to get Lavina out through one of the windows, but, although poor Roy was dead, his blank eyeballs upturned and protruding, they could not leave him.

The gangsters had ceased their fighting and turned upon their common enemy. Those who had not already fled began to hurl bottles and chairs at the advancing police, but scores of Specials were now pouring into the room behind the shock column of hardened regulars.

At a sharp word of command, their formation broke into two wings, each of which swept sideways, encircling great batches of the riotous crew. People were now stumbling back through the windows, driven in by more squadrons of police who were lining the pavements outside. The gangsters were being forced into corners and beaten to their knees.

Suddenly a big Sergeant, with an angry eye, charged across the floor and, seizing Derek by the scruff of the neck, shouted:

'Come on, you!'

At the same moment a young Special grabbed Lavina with a yell of 'Keep your claws down or I'll have to hurt you.'

Before they had time to exchange a word they were hauled to their feet and dragged in opposite directions.

Derek Does His Damnedest

'Steady on, Sergeant!' gasped Derek. 'I haven't been throwing any bottles.'

'You can tell that to the magistrate in the morning,' the big man panted. He had an ugly bruise over one eye and no cause whatever to feel tolerant towards the rioters.

'I didn't assault you and I'm not drunk. You've got no right to arrest me.' Derek struggled to free himself from the iron grip of his captor.

'Oh, yes, I have—participating in riotous assembly; and I'll add "resisting arrest" to that if you're not careful.'

"All right, then. But hang on a minute.'

Lavina had been pulled a dozen yards away by the young Special. She was still weeping hysterically and making little resistance, but Derek pointed with his free hand anxiously towards her.

'Listen, Sergeant. That lady I was with—she's Lady Curry. For goodness' sake don't separate me from her at a time like this.'

'I don't care if she's the Duchess of Dartmoor,' grunted the Sergeant with heavy humour. 'Men one way and women the other. That's the order.' He gave Derek a violent shove towards two constables. 'Here! Keep your eye on this one. I found him kneeling, beside a chap who'd had his head bashed in.'

A number of the police had now formed two lines. Behind one they had penned a large number of their male captives and behind the other, at the far side of the room, the women. They were rapidly sorting out the rest of the mob and clearing the centre of the ballroom.

Derek found himself among a motley crowd that now looked less than ever like regular patrons of the Dorchester. Most of them were drunk, many had cuts and bruises, torn clothes, ruffled hair and blood upon their faces.

On glancing down he saw that his own hands and shirt-cuffs were bloodstained from having raised poor Roy's battered head off Lavina's lap. He peered anxiously between the shoulders of two stalwart Specials but could see nothing of her.

A few moments later the police began to march their prisoners off in batches. Craning his neck, Derek caught one glimpse of Lavina. She was being hustled along in the midst of a group of drunk and cursing women. At that moment she looked across and, with a shrill cry of 'Derek! Derek!' made a desperate attempt to run towards him; but a policeman firmly thrust her back and she was forced to leave the ballroom with the others.

When the women had all gone, the men were shepherded out in groups of about a dozen. The lounge was now clear except for little knots of police and some harassed-looking members of the hotel staff. Outside the entrance of the hotel a line of small Ford vans was drawn up. Derek and his companions were hustled into one. The doors were slammed, locked, and the van drove off.

It was completely dark inside. Some of the drunks were jolted off their feet and the others were badly jostled, but their drive was a short one. When the van came to a halt, and its doors were unlocked, Derek tumbled out of it to find himself standing on grass in the fresh night air. After a second he recognised the lights of Grosvenor House and the skyline of Park Lane, above the trees in the distance, and realised that he was in Hyde Park.

On looking round he saw that they were outside a barbed-wire encampment, which was guarded by soldiers in khaki. There were many police and military about, but Derek did not have long to observe them as he and his companions were hurried into a large wooden hut just by the entrance of the barbed-wire enclosure.

Inside it a Guards Captain was seated behind a trestle table. Beside him was a Corporal, busily writing upon a stack of forms. Two or three orderlies stood near, besides a double row of policemen who had participated in the raid on the Dorchester.

One by one the men in Derek's group were pushed forward, and when particulars of each had been taken down by the Corporal, they were handed over to the military and marched outside again.

When it came to Derek's turn, the Captain asked: 'Name?'

'Derek Burroughs.'

'Address?'

'The Old Mill, Stapleton, Surrey.'

'Charge?' The Captain looked interrogatively towards the group of policemen, and the big Sergeant stepped forward.

'Riotous assembly, sir. And would you add to that—when arrested, was kneeling beside the body of a fair man, aged about thirty, who had had his head bashed in.'

The Officer nodded and signed to Derek to move away so that the next prisoner could come forward, but Derek stood his ground and said quickly:

'Look here, this is all an awful mistake. I was in the Dorchester having supper.'

'I know,' interrupted the Captain wearily. 'They're all saying that.'

'But listen,' Derek insisted. 'I'm not drunk. I was with Lady Curry but we were separated and I've simply got to find her.'

'Sorry.' The Guards Captain fingered his small, dark moustache. 'I'm afraid I can't release you because, you see. you've been charged. We'll have to hold you with the rest until the morning.'

'But I'm not a rioter. We got mixed up in this affair,' Derek protested.

'Well, that's your fault, isn't it? The Government has appealed to everybody to stay indoors so as to prevent this sort of thing happening. Anyhow, you've no need to worry. They'll probably let you off with a caution tomorrow.'

'But, don't you see, it's not myself I'm worried about,' Derek cried in desperation. 'It's Lady Curry. God knows where they've taken her and she was lugged off among a lot of drunken women.'

The Officer shrugged. 'I can't imagine how any decent woman got mixed up in a show like this and, for all I know, you're just trying to put one over me. Any number of people are tonight. I'm really very sorry but I can't give you any more time. Take him away.'

The wretched Derek was pulled from the table, thrust out of the hut and handed over to a Corporal, who passed him in through the iron gates of the barbed-wire prisoners' cage.

He looked gloomily round him. There was no moon but it was a fine night and the stars gave enough light to see by. In the big encampment there were hundreds of men standing, sitting or lying on the grass. On speaking to some of them he soon discovered that comparatively few had been brought in from the Dorchester. Most of them had been rounded up from other hotels, restaurants and bars, as, apparently, the riot in the Dorchester was only symptomatic of the sort of thing that was happening all over London that night wherever supplies of drink could be got for the tak'ng; and the police were now systematically clearing and closing down such places.

There were no troops in the encampment but plenty of sentries outside it and, after walking a little way round its rim, Derek saw that he would not stand the least chance of getting away even if he could have wriggled through the eight-foot-high mesh of barbed-wire which fenced in himself and his fellow prisoners.

He was acutely worried about Lavina. The shock of seeing Roy killed before her eyes was quite enough to have sent such a highly-strung girl out of her mind. Again and again he cursed himself for having allowed her to remain there among such a crowd when they were so clearly boiling up for trouble. Yet so strong a personality animated her slender body that he doubted if anyone else would have succeeded, where he had failed, in persuading her to go home before she wanted to.

As he let his imagination race over the possibilities of her present situation, he groaned. He had just got to get free himself and find her somehow.

Retracing his steps to the gate, which was some twelve feet wide, made of steel bars and hinged on two great posts, he peered through it. The sentry remained as though dumb and ignored his questions but, after a little, Derek managed to attract the attention of a Sergeant-Major and, beckoning him over, offered him a cigarette. The Sergeant-Major took it through the bars of the gate with a polite 'Thanks, old chap.'

'What chance is there of getting out of this place?' Derek asked.

'Not an earthly, until you've been before the Court in the morning,' the man replied, with a friendly grin.

Derek then told his story of Roy's murder and how Lavina had been dragged off by the police.

The Sergeant-Major was sympathetic, but unhelpful. 'Hard luck, that,' he nodded, 'but I'm afraid there's nothing I can do about it.'

After a little hesitation Derek produced his note case. It had about £50 in it and, opening it up so as to make certain that the Sergeant-Major could see its contents, he said:

'I'm not trying to bribe you but I'll make it very well worth your while if you can help me. The girl I was with must be in a shocking state and I've absolutely got to get to her somehow.'

'It's no good, sir,' the Sergeant-Major shook his head. 'I'd help you gladly if I could, but I can't. The sentries on the gate have their orders and no one's to be let out unless an officer signs a written form releasing them.'

'Couldn't you talk to one of the officers for me, then?' urged Derek.

'Yes, I might do that, though I doubt if it will do much good. They're a pretty decent lot in the ordinary way but just now being so overworked makes 'em a bit abrupt and disinclined for conversation. Still, when the Lieutenant does his rounds I'll wait my chance and have a word with him.'

'Thanks—thanks most awfully,' Derek muttered. 'Look, take this on account and drink my health with it tomorrow.' He thrust a couple of pounds into the Sergeant-Major's hand.

'Very good of you, I'm sure.' The notes disappeared into the Sergeant-Major's pocket. 'I can't promise anything, though, and the Lieutenant won't be round for another three-quarters of an hour or so. If I have any luck with him, where'll I find you?'

'I'll be about here. My name's Derek Burroughs. If you give a shout, I'll hear you.'

'Right-o, sir.' The Sergeant-Major gave a perfunctory salute and moved away into darkness.

As Derek turned, he bumped into a tall, thin, bony man who had been standing with a group of others just behind him. The tall man muttered an apology and went on talking to his cronies, a rough-looking lot in caps and scarves who looked as

though they had been rounded up from some public-house.

For a few moments Derek stood still, then he began to walk up and down making a detour here and there to avoid little groups or some of the drunks, who were now huddled, snoring, on the grass; yet he hardly noticed them, his brain was so occupied with the thought of Lavina.

Where had they taken her? To Holloway? No, that would be full to overflowing. Much more probably it would be to some municipal building converted into a temporary prison or a barbed-wire cage for women in some other part, of the Park. Anyhow, wherever she was, she must be in a most desperate state. Derek knew her well enough to realise that the toughness she sometimes displayed was not even skin-deep; it was only a sham armour of silver paper by which she deceived people so that she could force her will upon them. Underneath, she was just a rather fragile, delicately-nurtured girl, with quick sympathies and a special horror of any form of uncleanness.

As he thought of her, cooped up somewhere with a lot of prostitutes, drunks and the riff-raff of the streets, he seethed with rage at his inability to help her. The fact that she was at least indirectly responsible for Roy's death would certainly have driven her half out of her senses with distress and remorse. All his old love for her had surged up again during this long day they had spent together. As he had told her in the afternoon, now that she was married he had every intention of suppressing it and, at the time, he had felt himself quite strong enough to do so; yet now, as he paced up and down, he would have given anything in the world to be able to get to her, put his arms round her, and comfort her.

The three-quarters of an hour he had to wait seemed absolutely interminable and, although he kept the gate in sight, each time he turned about he walked a little farther away from it. He had just covered his maximum distance so far and was about to turn again when somebody tapped him on the shoulder.

Looking up, he recognised the tall man who had been near him when he was speaking to the Sergeant-Major.

'You're Derek Burroughs, ain't yer?' the tall man asked in a husky voice.

'Yes,' said Derek quickly.

'You was torkin' to the Sergeant-Major 'alf an hour ago, wasn't yer? Well, 'e's lookin' for yer.'

'Is he?' Derek started forward towards the gate but the man gripped him quickly by the arm.

'Not that way, mate. The Serg' says to me as 'ow I was to find you and, when I did, bring you to the far side of the camp where there ain't so many people 'angin' around. I think 'e's got some idea in 'is noddle for gettin' you out of this.'

'Thank God,' breathed Derek, and, without further hesitation, he began to stride beside the tall man towards the less crowded section of the encampment.

The barbed-wire cage enclosed an oblong space running north and south, several hundred yards in length. The gate was at the southern end and comparatively few of the prisoners had bothered to move far from it after being ordered inside.

As they advanced, the sleeping forms scattered over the grass grew fewer and by the time they had covered two hundred and fifty yards the last of the prisoners had been swallowed up in the darkness behind them.

Suddenly Derek felt a vague sense of apprehension. There was a rustling in the grass at his rear. Glancing swiftly over his shoulder he saw that three men were padding softly on his heels.

He had just time to avoid a blow that one of the men aimed at his head, by springing aside, and all three were upon him.

In an instant he saw the trap into which he had fallen. The tall man had overheard his conversation with the Sergeant and seen him produce his wallet with the wad of notes in it. His treacherous guide and the three evil-looking thugs who had suddenly appeared now formed a circle round him. He had been lured to a quiet part of the camp so that they could attack and rob him.

The odds were heavy, but in his day Derek had been a runner-up for the Public Schools boxing championship. He was still under thirty and a healthy outdoor life had kept him remarkably fit. But he did not mean to rely on that. Lavina's rescue from the purgatory she must be suffering now depended on his own escape. There were plenty of people within call.

He lashed out, giving one of the men a crack on the jaw that sent him reeling, and at the same moment opened his own mouth to shout for help. But at that very second the tall fellow struck him a savage blow on the head from behind. His shout was never uttered; instead, his back teeth clicked and his front teeth bit into the tip of his tongue, causing him almost to screech with pain. Instantly all four of his attackers flung themselves at him.

He was borne down, kneed a man in the stomach and, wriggling free, staggered to his feet again. With the strength of desperation he hit out right and left, the image of Lavina ever in his mind; and many of his punches got home, as he knew from his smarting knuckles.

Suddenly the tall man landed a brutal kick on his shin, another of them got in a heavy blow on his ear and a third, charging him head downward, butted him in the midriff. With a gasp he was sent flying to the ground, the man on top of him.

For the next few moments he suffered indescribably. Heavy boots thudded into his ribs. One of the men jumped upon his stomach. Kneeling beside him, they wrenched out his pocket-book and delivered blow after blow on his face wherever he was unable to guard it. A vicious kick on the back of the head caused him to see red lights stabbing the blackness before his eyes; then he fainted.

As consciousness left him, his last coherent thought was that these devils had robbed him of all chance of getting free to find Lavina.

Hell in Hyde Park

When Derek came round he was one mass of aches and bruises. With infinite caution and considerable pain he lifted his hand to his head. It felt the size of a pumpkin and as though the soft matter inside was gently surging to and fro, each beat of his heart propelling it backwards and forwards in great waves of pain.

At first he did not know where he was or what had happened to him, but gradually his thoughts became coherent and he remembered how he had been attacked and robbed by some of his fellow prisoners.

With a great effort of will he sat up and began to examine himself all over. His shin hurt abominably where he had been kicked and his ribs pained him every time he took a breath, but he did not think that any of his bones were broken. There was a lump on the back of his head and another on his jaw. One of his eyes was half-closed and from the sticky crust which had formed on his upper lip he knew that his nose had been bleeding.

It struck him then that the sky was much lighter. He must have been out for a long time, as dawn was approaching. He began again to wonder miserably about Lavina and in what wretched state the new day would find her.

Looking round him, he saw that nearly all his fellow-prisoners were lying on the ground asleep. There were many more of them than there had been when he was put in the cage. Evidently the police had been rounding up fresh batches of rioters and interning them all night. There were now several thousand men in the great oblong barbed-wire encampment. Vaguely he began to wonder if he would be able to find his assailants and charge them, but he had seen the tall, bony man only by starlight and the others had been no more than whirling figures in the semi-darkness. With such a vague memory of his face, to look for the tall man among all these hundreds of prisoners would be like searching for a needle in a haystack.

Slowly he got to his feet and, limping painfully, made his way to the gate of the enclosure. About fifty men were congregated there; recent arrivals, who were still telling each other of their exploits during the night and how they had been captured.

Clinging on to the bars of the gate for support, Derek peered through them and called to the sentry. The man took no notice but, after a few moments, Derek managed to attract the attention of a passing Sergeant.

'What do you want?' asked the Sergeant gruffly.

'I've been attacked and robbed,' muttered Derek.

''Been in a rough house trying to rob people yourself more likely.' The Sergeant stared unsympathetically. 'Plenty of your kind brought in tonight.'

'No. It was here in the camp, a few hours ago. Some thugs beat me up and stole my money.'

The soldier peered a little closer in the uncertain light. 'You do look a bit of a mess,' he granted.

'I'm pretty well all-in.' Derek mumbled. 'For God's sake get me a doctor, can't you.'

'All right, then. You'll have to wait your turn, though.'

'My turn?'

'Yes. The doctor's been busy on casualties all night. He's still got a dozen or so in that hut over there waiting to be patched up.' The Sergeant nodded in the direction of a fair-sized wooden building some distance away then, turning, called a Guardsman out of the guard hut nearby.

The gate was unlocked and, taking Derek by the arm, the Guardsman led him over to the doctor's quarters.

Inside a small ante-room two lines of men were sitting dejectedly on wooden benches. Some were already roughly bandaged with blood-soaked rags, and all had injuries received in fighting. One was sobbing quietly in a corner and another moaned monotonously. Derek took his place upon a bench and waited.

It was over an hour before his turn came to go inside and, in the meantime, other casualties had been brought in to replace those who had been treated.

The doctor proved to be a fat, bald, sharp-eyed little man wearing the uniform of a Captain. No nurses were present but he had two Orderlies in white overalls as assistants and one of them was dressing an arm wound for the last patient as Derek entered.

'Well, what's your trouble?' the Doctor asked sharply. He had been working all night without respite and was in no mood to exchange idle pleasantries.

'I was attacked and beaten up,' Derek said briefly.

'All right. Better strip, then.'

The other Orderly helped Derek in the painful process of getting off his clothes. He was then told to lie down on a bare, hard couch in the centre of the room and the doctor gave him a swift examination; some of the spots on which he pressed firmly with his thumbs causing his examinee excruciating agony.

'Not much wrong with you,' he said after a moment. 'Nasty bruise on your shin but no bones broken. A day or two in bed will see you fit—when you can get there; but you're not a hospital case. I can't spare beds at St. George's for anyone who's not seriously injured.'

The Orderlies came forward and dabbed the worst of Derek's bruises with some soothing ointment. As they produced some bandages he said slowly:

'I'll be all right, but what I'm worried about is getting out of here. You see, I was with a girl last night and we were separated. I've simply got to find her.'

'I'm afraid there isn't much chance of your being able to do that. The orders are that anybody who's been arrested is to be kept inside until the trouble's over.'

'What?' Derek sat up with a start, felt a stab of pain and sank back with a moan. 'But they can't do that—it isn't legal.'

'My dear man, under its emergency powers the Government can do anything and, to my mind, they're behaving very sensibly. Nearly all the lawless elements of the city were out on the spree last night and that gave the police just the chance they wanted to collar them. By keeping them behind barbed wire we'll be able to stop a great deal of looting.'

"But I'm not a crook. I wasn't even drunk when I was arrested.'

'That's just your bad luck, then. But, if you were mixed up in such a crowd, you asked for it, and evidently you're an irresponsible person.'

'I'm nothing of the kind; and the girl I was with is highly respectable, yet she was lugged off with a lot of drunken street-women.'

'Perhaps, but the very fact that you were involved in a riot justifies the Government in arresting you both for your own protection.'

When the Orderlies had finished bandaging Derek he was told to dress while another casualty was brought in. But when he had struggled back into his clothes, he made one last effort.

'Look here, I've simply got to find this young woman I was with somehow. Couldn't you possibly get me an interview with an Officer?'

'No, I couldn't,' the doctor replied irritably. 'There aren't enough Officers in the whole battalion to listen to one-tenth of the people who're asking to see them. Here, drink this up; it'll take your head away. Then get out and have a good sleep on the grass.'

Derek dutifully drank up the potion he was offered and, leaving, was led back to the barbed-wire enclosure.

The people in it were rousing up now and he began to look round with a vague hope of finding the tall man who had trapped him, but he could not see him anywhere.

Half an hour later the gates were opened. Some lorries drove in and the Troops who were with them lined up the prisoners in long queues to receive their breakfast ration. It consisted of a mug of coffee—which had to be drunk on the spot and the mug passed on to the next man in the queue—a hunk of bread with a slice of bully, and an orange.

Derek carried his portion away to the far side of the camp, where it was less crowded, and slowly began to chew this sustaining but not particularly appetising breakfast. His jaw hurt him every time he moved it and he wasn't feeling at all like food, but he decided that he ought to eat it if he could do so, to keep up his strength as much as possible.

As he ate he thought of Lavina again—probably receiving a similar ration in some other encampment with hundreds of women. Somehow he had simply got to escape and find her. At the worst, he had expected to be brought before a magistrate or military tribunal that morning and dismissed with a caution or a fine; and he had assumed that the same would happen to Lavina. Even if he had failed to locate her while she was still a prisoner, he had anticipated that she would make her way back during the morning to St. James's Square and that they would then be able to set off together down to Stapleton.

But now it seemed all prisoners were to be detained for the next three days, which meant that, unless he could escape, both he and she would still be captives when the comet either singed or hit the earth. He had been banking more than he realised on the Ark proving their salvation, however great the catastrophe, and now they were both to be robbed of their chance of surviving in it.

Wearily he turned the problem over in his still aching brain. Bribery was no good, now that he had lost his money. As it had appeared impossible to break out of the cage the night before, it would be even more difficult in daylight. Perhaps if he could find the friendly Sergeant-Major again and get an interview with an Officer, he might still be able to persuade them to release him.

Almost unconsciously he turned over on his side and pillowed his head upon his arm. For some reason he was feeling extraordinarily drowsy. Perhaps the doctor had put something in the headache draught he had been given—something to make him sleep. But he mustn't sleep. He mustn't let himself go to sleep, whatever happened. Yet a moment later he had fallen into dreamless slumber.

When he woke it was already evening. He felt considerably better than he had done in the morning. His head pained him less and his shin was not throbbing quite so agonisingly; but as he moved he gave a groan, for he was almost as stiff as if he had been imprisoned in a strait jacket.

By easing his muscles cautiously he gradually got back the use of his limbs, and on looking round he saw that the encampment was now more crowded than ever. Evidently, fresh batches of prisoners had been brought in during the hours he had been sleeping. There was now hardly a vacant patch of grass in the whole enclosure.

He glanced across at a round-faced little man who was seated near him and asked if he knew what time it was. The man produced a large gold watch.

'Ten to seven, mate,' he said. 'That's a nasty eye of yours. How d'you get it?'

Derek gingerly felt his swollen left eye, which was now almost entirely closed. 'Here, last night,' he said. 'Some toughs set on me and robbed me of my wallet.'

'That was a bit hard,' the man grinned cheerfully. 'Where did the cops pinch you?'

'At the Dorchester.'

'They pinched me at the "Bunch of Grapes" in the Strand. Cor, it was a beano, and no mistake! My name's Alf Wilkin. What's yours?'

'Derek Burroughs. D'you think there's any chance of getting out of this place?'

'Not much, with all these khaki boys around. But who cares? It's bin a nice day in the sunshine and there's some talk of their issuing us blankets tonight. The grub's not bad, either, and it's free. We might do much worse than sit around here for a few days.'

Derek did not go into details with Mr. Wilkin as to why he was so frantically anxious to regain his freedom but, pulling himself together, nodded good-bye to the little man and made his way towards the gate.

Knowing now that it was no good trying to talk to the sentry, he waited till a Corporal came along and inquired for the Sergeant-Major.

'He's out on duty,' the Corporal replied. 'They're mopping up down Limehouse way this evening.'

'When will he be back?' Derek asked.

'How should 1 know?'

'Then d'you think you could get hold of an Officer for me?'

' 'Fraid not. It isn't for me to go worrying the Officers with prisoners' grievances.'

'Oh, hell!' Derek exclaimed, as he turned away dejectedly.

'What's wrong, old chap?' asked a friendly voice nearby.

The speaker was a youngish man dressed in a suit of overalls

and a flying-helmet. He offered a packet of cigarettes, and Derek took one gratefully as he began to give a brief version of his plight.

'You've certainly had a raw deal,' the young man remarked when Derek had done, 'and I can sympathise because, as a matter of fact, I'm here on account of a girl myself.'

'Was she arrested, too?' inquired Derek.

'No. I haven't seen her for six weeks. That's just the rub. My name's Babforth and I live up at Hull. But my girl's a Londoner; her home's in Kilburn. We met at the Butlin Holiday Camp at Skegness last year, had a grand time and absolutely fell for each other right away. We're not engaged exactly, but we write to each other twice a week and I've managed to get up to see her half a dozen times in the last ten months. When I heard the Prime Minister's speech on the radio the other night, I got anxious about her.'

'Naturally,' agreed Derek.

'So I made up my mind to come up to London on my motorbike, with the idea that whatever happened we'd be together. If I'd only got here yesterday things would have been all right, but, apparently, when the evacuation started this morning they not only closed all roads to incoming traffic but they've got police posts everywhere which are turning back pedestrians as well; in fact, they won't let anybody into London now who hasn't got a permit.'

'I see. And I suppose you tried to gate-crash?'

'That's it,' Babforth nodded. 'Wouldn't you have done the same? Hang it, I'd come all that way to be with my girl and I was worried out of my wits about her. I tried four different roads but I was turned back every time so I abandoned the old bike and climbed over a garden wall. But they've got a ring of police and Tommies the whole way round London, and a Special spotted me. I gave him a run for his money all right and when he did collar me I knocked him down; but he whistled up a couple of his pals and they put me in a van and sent me here. Where I was a fool was to hit the Officer. If I hadn't done that, they'd only have turned me back again. Then, if I'd waited till tonight, I'd have been able to get through the police cordon easily in the darkness.'

'Yes, that's where you slipped up,' Derek agreed, 'although

E

I expect I should have done the same myself. Anyhow, as we're both in the same sort of mess we must put our heads together and think up some scheme for getting out of here. How's the evacuation going?'

'Pretty well. As they've cleared the roads of all incoming traffic, it's just one steady stream of cars and buses going out; although, of course, I didn't see what was happening in Central London.'

For a little time the two of them discussed their rather slender prospects of escape. Derek was still feeling weak and ill but having a decent fellow like Babforth to talk to cheered him up considerably.

At half-past seven the gates of the encampment were opened and the food lorries drove in again. As Derek had been sleeping when the lunch ration was issued, he now felt hungry and, with Babforth beside him, managed to get a fairly good place in one of the many queues.

To his disappointment he found that supper consisted only of tea, cheese and biscuits, a more solid meal of stew and plum-pudding having been issued in the middle of the day. But there was a liberal supply and when he told the Quartermaster who was superintending operations that he had missed his lunch he was given a double portion without argument.

In the gentle light they sat on the grass nibbling their cheese and biscuits. Babforth had fortunately provided himself with several packets of Players on his way down from Hull so they had an ample supply of cigarettes and, having decided that it was useless to attempt anything until darkness had fallen, they lay side by side smoking while they waited for night to come.

Unlike the previous evening, the sky was overcast so they could not actually watch the sun sinking, but by 9.40 the outline of Park Lane to the east had become blurred in semi-darkness; while the colour was rapidly fading from the trees to the west in Kensington Gardens.

Then, almost imperceptibly the sky took on a different hue; a reddish tinge, as though a great fire was burning somewhere in the far distance. The men in the camp began to stir uneasily. At one moment a good two-thirds of them had been lying or sitting on the grass. The next, they were all standing on their feet. Derek felt a strange, unaccountable glow of exultation run through him and he saw that Babforth's eyes had taken on a glassy stare.

As the sky reddened in the west a low murmur went up which gradually increased to an angry roar. The prisoners were all in movement now. Some had started to quarrel over portions of unconsumed rations. Others began to move from all sides, as though by a common impulse, towards the gate.

Derek, too, instinctively turned in that direction and Bab-forth strode along beside him. Soon they were wedged in a struggling, yelling mass and found themselves shouting aloud like the rest.

Fortunately, they had been some distance from the entrance of the compound when the mob began to converge upon it; otherwise they might have been crushed to death. As it was, they could hear the agonised screaming of the men a hundred yards in front who were now being pressed flat against the iron bars of the great gates.

Suddenly, under the enormous pressure, they gave; and the mob surged forward fighting and struggling to get through them, as though they had been trapped in a building where there was a raging fire.

The jam was so great that Derek's damaged ribs suffered severely. He kept his arms pressed down to his sides to give them some protection, but after a few minutes he thought his heart would burst and a scream was forced from him. Then the pressure eased. He caught a glimpse of the barbed-wire entanglements now on his right rear and knew that although he had not even seen the gates he had been carried through them.

Those prisoners who had already succeeded in escaping were racing across the Park in the direction of Park Lane and, despite his pain, Derek felt a thrill of elation at the thought that he, to, was now once more a free man. But next moment the man in front of him tripped over the body of one of the poor wretches who had been crushed in bursting open the gate and Derek pitched forward on top of them.

Stretching out a hand, Babforth grabbed Derek's elbow and for a second he regained his feet; but Babforth was swept on by the swirling stream of prisoners who were still stampeding through the gate, and a violent thrust behind sent Derek spinning to the ground once more. He felt a heavy boot descend in the middle of his back and the mob came surging over him.

Instinctively he threw up his arms to protect his head. It seemed quite certain that he would be trampled to death. For the second time in twenty-four hours he was kicked, bashed, stamped on. As he was far from recovered from his first flailing the second was even more painful, yet now he was at least face down and the blows that rained upon him were not deliberate.

After what seemed an eternity the human herd had passed. He lay still for a moment, half-stunned and breathless. Then h& managed to raise his head again and saw that the red glow in the western sky was fading. Dimly he realised that very soon the troops, whom the comet must also have affected, would regain their senses and start rounding-up such prisoners as they could. He must get away at once or he would be recaptured.

All about him lay the bodies of crushed and trampled men. Some of them were now sitting up groaning over their injuries; others lay still where they had fallen, never to rise again. In the distance a number of the escaped prisoners were still running towards Park Lane.

Aching in every limb he swayed to his feet and set off at a drunken run; several of the fallen, who had not been too badly trampled, were also staggering up and running with him.

When they reached Grosvenor Gate a trickle of escapers was still passing through it but behind them angry shouts to halt told them that the soldiers were already giving chase. The great iron gates of the Park had been burst by the same method as those of the encampment. The bodies of more dead and injured were strewn in the roadway outside. Derek did not pause to look at them but lurched on down Upper Brook Street into Grosvenor Square.

The comet had now set and full night was come. Police whistles were shrilling from both behind and in front as Derek ran. Ahead of him, on the Carlos Place corner of Grosvenor Square, he saw a body of police heading back the escapers, so he turned on his track and ran down South Audley Street.

Except for the prisoners, who had,scattered in all directions, the street was empty. Every shop was in darkness and the blinds of most of the houses were drawn. As he reached the cul-de-sac which ends in Mount Street Gardens he noticed that the windows of the wine-merchant's shop on the corner opposite Grosvenor Chapel had been smashed. At the same moment he saw some police coming round the corner of South Street just ahead of him, so he halted, turned abruptly, and scrambled in through the broken window of the wine-merchant's.

The place had been looted; it was a shambles of broken bottles and spilt liquor. Feeling his way forward in the darkness, he found some offices behind the shop. Entering one, he closed the door behind him, tripped over something, and fell upon the carpet.

For a moment he was so exhausted that he could not move but lay panting where he had fallen. When he got his breath back a little he lit a match from a box that Babsforth had given him. The thing he had tripped over was the dead body of a man.

The match having burnt down to his fingers he did not light another, but remained sitting on the floor with his back propped against a desk. Apparently, the police had not seen him enter the shop or they would have followed him already, so he felt that the best thing he could do was to remain there until the excitement had subsided.

A quarter of an hour later he lit another match and peered round him by its feeble light. Apart from the dead man, there was nothing unusual about the office. The looters had evidently contented themselves with drinking or smashing the bottles on the shelves in the shop outside during their drunken orgy. At one side of the room there was a mahogany cupboard, the top of which formed a tasting table, and, above it, shelves backed by mirrors with glasses upon them.

Crawling to the cupboard, he opened it and found some bottles inside. Picking one up he poured himself a drink without bothering to find out what the bottle contained. On sip-Ping it he found it to be sherry and swallowed a couple of glasses one after the other.

The generous wine restored him a little, so leaving the office, he went out into the shop and peered through the broken windows. As there was no one about he slipped out into the street again and set off, at a walk this time, towards St. James's Square.

He could hardly see from the pain that racked him but he managed to find his way somehow down Curzon Street, through Lansdowne Passage and up Berkeley Street.

Normally the walk from South Audley Street to St. James's Square would not have taken him more than fifteen minutes, but he was so exhausted that he had to go very slowly. The street lamps were only on at half-pressure and there was no traffic except for an occasional police car or military lorry. There were a few pedestrians hurrying along here or there and a certain number of police patrolling in couples, but wherever Derek saw these he avoided them by crossing to the other side of the road. He instinctively felt like a hunted criminal and, in any case, his state might have caused them to ask questions.

Crossing Piccadilly, he turned down St. James's Street, along King Street and at last entered St. James's Square. Staggering up the steps of Sam Curry's house, he rang the bell and banged violently with the knocker. Almost at once the door was thrown open and Hemmingway stood there framed against a dim light in the hall.

'Good God!' he exclaimed, as Derek clutched at him and fell forward on the mat; and, hauling him to his feet, he went on angrily: 'Where the devil have you been, man? I've been waiting here all day for you.'

'I—I got caught—arrested by the police,' Derek muttered. 'I've only just escaped.'

'Never mind that. You can tell me about it later. What have you done with Lavina?'

'I've lost her,' Derek moaned. 'She's imprisoned somewhere but I don't know where.'

A strange light suddenly leapt into Hemmingway's eyes. 'You fool!' he breathed, with menacing quietness. 'If I can't find her I'll break your neck for this.'

Hemmingway Goes into Action

Derek suddenly slumped forward and catching him as he fell, Hemmingway saw that he had fainted. Pulling one of the unconscious man's arms round his neck he heaved him up in a fireman's lift across his shoulders, carried him into the lounge and gently lowered him on to a sofa.

At first, in the dim light of the hall, Hemmingway had not fully grasped the shocking state Derek was in but it was now clear that he had been through a terrible gruelling.

His suit was so torn, bloodstained and dirty that it would have disgraced a tramp. His collar was gone, his tie a rag knotted round his neck; even his shoes were cut and filthy. Sweat, dust and congealed blood matted his light-brown, wavy hair. His left eye was closed and the swollen flesh all round it had a horrid purplish hue. Cuts and abrasions disfigured his regular features and his hands were as grimy as if he had been crawling across a ploughed field.

Crossing the hall to the downstairs cloakroom, Hemmingway picked up a jug to fill it with hot water but as he turned the tap he suddenly remembered that the boilers in the house were out. He himself had had to make do that morning with a quick splash in a cold bath—a thing he hated. Filling the jug with cold water and collecting a couple of towels, he carried them back to Derek and, kneeling down, began to sponge some of the grime off his injured face.

After a few moments Derek began to groan.

'It's all right, old chap. You're safe enough now,' Hemmingway comforted him.

'Lavina,' muttered Derek, coming round. 'Lavina . . .'

'Yes, I know.' Hemmingway's face darkened. 'But we'll go into that in a moment.'

Walking over to a side-table he mixed a stiff whisky-and-soda. 'Here, drink this,' he said, propping Derek's head up on one arm and holding the glass to his lips.

Derek swallowed some of the whisky, choked a little, and sat up. 'God knows where she is,' he murmured, 'but we've got to find her.'

'Sure.' Hemmingway continued his ministrations with a towel and water. 'But I want to get you cleaned up a bit first, otherwise the dirt will get into those cuts and inflame them. Here, take the towel yourself and do what you can, while I go and put on some hot water.'

Going down to the kitchen he filled the largest kettles he could find and put them on the stove. When he returned, Derek had finished his drink but was lying back on the sofa, evidently too weak to be able even to bathe his wounds.

'Now, d'you think you can tell me your story?' Hemmingway said, sitting down beside him. 'I'm afraid you're pretty done, but I must know what happened before I can go into action.'

Derek nodded weakly and gave a more or less coherent account of what had happened since he had left St. James's Square with Lavina and Roy the previous evening. Hemmingway listened without making a single comment. He was not particularly distressed when he heard of Roy's death, as he only knew him very slightly and had not been at all favourably impressed with what little he had seen of him. With Derek, on the other hand, he was furiously angry. Derek had been responsible for Lavina and it was not his fault that she had not had her brains bashed out by that bottle descending upon her head. As it was, they did not know if she was alive or dead and it was going to be the devil's own job to trace her. Hemmingway knew that, if he had been in Derek's shoes, he would have taken Lavina out of the Dorchester no matter what she said—even if he'd had to yank her out by the scruff of the neck —long before the trouble had started. But he did not allow the least sign of his inward feelings to show in his face as he listened to the injured man's story.

When Derek had done, Hemmingway left him again, carried the kettles of hot water up to his own bathroom, got out a clean suit of pyjamas and turned down his bed, which he had remade himself that morning.

On his return to the lounge Derek asked weakly: 'What had we better do now? Is it any good trying to telephone anywhere before we set out to try and find her?'

'You can leave all that to me,' Hemmingway replied briefly. 'You're going to bed, my boy. Come on, up you get!'

'But I can't. I've got to . . .' Derek began to protest.

'You're going to do as I tell you. You're about all-in, my friend; and in your present state instead of a help you'd be a hindrance. I doubt if you could walk another hundred yards and you couldn't run if your life depended on it.' Without further protest he hauled Derek to his feet, supported him up the stairs to the bathroom and began to undress him.

Derek knew that Hemmingway was right as, in a mist of pain, he allowed himself to be stripped and bathed like a child in the luke-warm water to which Hemmingway had added a good ration of disinfectant.

Actually, Hemmingway grudged every moment of the time he was giving to his self-imposed duties as Derek's nurse. The stupid fool deserved all he had got and was lucky to be alive at all, was what he was thinking. But Derek was much too weak to look after himself and Hemmingway had not the heart to leave him, perhaps for many hours, uncared for; so he put a cheerful face on the business and got through with it as quickly as he could.

At last when Derek was rebandaged, his cuts and bruises eased by a liberal application of healing ointment, and safely tucked up in bed, Hemmingway said to him:

'You've lost your own car, I suppose?'

'Yes, we left it outside the Dorchester.'

'Well, fortunately mine's still in the garage at the back of the house. Now get this clearly before you go ofF to sleep. I'm going out now to try and find Lavina. It's impossible to say how long I'll be, but we've still got the best part of forty-eight hours before the balloon goes up. If I run her to earth I shall bring her back here and we'll go down in the car to Stapleton together. But if I don't return, you'll know I've had no luck. In that case, after two nights and a day in bed you'll be fit enough to walk down to Stapleton, if need be. Don't wait for us any longer, as we may not get back at all, but start out on your own early in the morning on the day after tomorrow. You ought to make it in about eight hours, allowing for plenty of rests, or less if you can manage to get a lift part of the way. But in the meantime, if you feel fit enough to get up you're not to leave the house because, if I do find Lavina, I'll want to get her out of London without the least delay. Have you got that?'

Derek nodded feebly. 'Yes. I wish to God I could come with you, but I can hardly lift a finger. Best of luck!'

'Thanks. I'll need it.' Hemmingway smiled with a friendliness he was far from feeling as he switched out the light and closed the door behind him.

On coming downstairs that morning he had naturally assumed that Lavina, Derek and Roy had returned from their previous night's joy-ride after he had gone to bed and were somewhere in the house still sleeping.

Having made tea, put some eggs on to boil and banged loudly on the gong to let them know that breakfast was nearly ready, he had expected that they would come down in dressing-gowns. When none of them appeared, he had visited their rooms and, finding them empty, realised at once that something very serious must have happened to keep them out all night.

His first thought was to telephone Scotland Yard and the hospitals, but the exchange informed him they were now only working on skeleton staffs and that since six o'clock that morning they had had to refuse all private calls in order to devote the lines exclusively to Government business. They also refused to take any telegrams, which prevented him from communicating either with Sam—who was by that time presumably at the Edmonton factory—or with Stapleton Court to try and ascertain if Lavina's party had, for some reason unknown, decided to drive down there direct during the night after their trip round the West End of London.

He had contemplated personal visits to Scotland Yard and some of his friends in various Government Services; but felt that, with the evacuation of London in full swing, they would all be far too busy to give him any help in a private inquiry where there was so little to go on except the bare fact that three people in a motor-car had failed to return to their home the night before. In addition, he feared that if he once left the house they might turn up in his absence which, if he was not there to set off with them, would further delay their departure to the country.

In consequence, he had decided that the only thing to do was to wait in the house in the hope that they would either come back to it or manage to send him some message to let him know what had happened to them.

He had made several more attempts to use the telephone but by midday the exchange no longer answered him and he could not even get the ringing tone, so now, having attended to Derek, he wasted no time in trying to get through to anybody.

Instead, he went to his private sitting-room, took a large automatic from a drawer, loaded it and put a handful of spare ammunition into his pockets. From another drawer he took a torch and fitted it with a new battery. He then unlocked the safe and, taking out all the money he could find, proceeded to distribute it about his person; some in his pockets for immediate use, but the larger amounts he placed in his shoes where he could not easily be robbed of it.

Downstairs he hunted round till he found a motoring map of London and the Home Counties and filled a flask up with brandy which went into his other hip pocket to balance the gun. He then descended to the basement.

In the scullery he found just what he wanted: a length of stout clothes-line and a bundle of firewood. Picking out the biggest pieces from the bundle, he knotted the rope securely round them so that when he had done he had a line about twelve feet long with the pieces of wood projecting at right-angles to it roughly twelve inches apart. Having removed his coat, he wound the whole contraption round his body and, proceeding to the odd man's room, he took a steel case-opener from the tool chest, stuffed it inside the rope and put on his coat again.

Returning upstairs, he selected a crop from a rack of sticks and sporting impedimenta that belonged to Sam. It was one that Sam had used in the War, made of bamboo covered with leather. The end of it was a fat Turk's-head filled with lead, and with the thong round one's wrist it made a most formidable weapon.

While he was making these preparations Hemmingway was half inclined to laugh at himself; but he had not the faintest idea where he would have to go or what he might have to do during the next twenty-four hours, and although the authorities were still maintaining an outward semblance of control, Derek's experiences showed that London was no longer a law-abiding city. Hemmingway simply wished to ensure his being able to bribe, fight, break in, or face any other emergency with which he might be faced, under the best possible conditions.

Leaving the house and the semi-darkened square, he proceeded east across Lower Regent Street and the Haymarket. The restaurants were all closed now and each had a police guard outside it to prevent looting of its stocks of drink. There were few people about and no traffic, except for patrolling police cars; and it was not until he got down to Trafalgar Square that he saw any considerable number of people.

Religious meetings were still in progress there although, owing to the evacuation, the lateness of the hour and the fact that all public transport services had now been cancelled until further notice, the crowd was nowhere near as large as that which had packed the square the night before. The audiences consisted mainly of those pig-headed citizens who had refused to leave their homes and a certain number of local A.R.P. wardens, fire-fighters, etc., who had come out for an airing while remaining near their posts.

There was no drunkenness or fatalistic jollification among the crowds now. Every public-house in London had been closed by order and the police, who had been issued with revolvers, had received instructions to shoot looters if they made any attempt to resist arrest.

Whitehall was open again but troops were mounting guard over all Government buildings and the entrance to Downing Street was closed by a wooden barricade; yet the lights were burning in nearly all the windows showing that the harassed authorities were still hard at work controlling the evacuation.

Hemmingway turned left towards Scotland Yard and its annexe, Cannon Row police station, but here he found the pavements blocked by a solid jam of people. Only the roadway was being kept open for traffic by the police.

He saw at once that he was not the only person who had come to inquire'for friends and relatives. There were several hundred in the two queues before him, all of whom, anxiously

silent or quietly sobbing, were in search of missing dear ones.

If he took his place in the rear of one of the queues it was clear that he would have to wait hours before he got anywhere near the police station; so, abandoning that idea, he walked round to the Embankment entrance of Scotland Yard. There was a small queue there, too, but in a few moments he had reached the police sergeant who was dealing with inquiries.

Knowing that Sam's name would carry more weight than his own and gambling on the fact that Sam was not known to the sergeant, he announced boldly:

'I'm Sir Samuel Curry. Would you be good enough to ask Colonel Hodgson if he could possibly spare me a moment?'

The sergeant looked dubious. 'The Assistant Commissioner's frantically busy, sir. I doubt if he can spare time to see anyone.'

'I know. He must be having a gruelling time just now. But, as I'm a personal friend, I think he'll see me if you send my name up.'

'Well, I'll do that, sir, although we don't like to bother him more than we have to. Just wait here a moment.' The sergeant spoke to a telephonist in a small lodge nearby, who put the call through.

An answer came back almost at once and the sergeant reported: 'The Assistant Commissioner says he'll see you, sir, but he may have to keep you waiting a little time. The constable, here, will take you through.'

Suppressing a sigh of relief, Hemmingway passed inside and was led by the constable down a succession of long stone corridors to a bare-looking waiting room. He sat there for some twenty minutes and was then summoned to the Assistant Commissioner's office. Colonel Hodgson was a shrewd-eyed, wiry haired man nearing fifty. He looked very tired as he had been working almost continuously for the last week, snatching only an hour or two's sleep in the building when nature absolutely demanded it, but his manner was still calm and cheerful.

'Hullo! You're not Sam Curry,' he said at once, as Hemmingway entered the room.

'No, sir,' Hemmingway apologised, 'but I'm his confidential secretary and I'm acting for him. I know you're a friend of his so I used his name to get in.'

The Colonel nodded. 'All right. Since you're in, let's hear what's brought you. But for God's sake don't waste my time on trifles.'

As briefly as he possibly could Hemmingway gave particulars of Lavina's disappearance.

'I'm sorry Sam's young wife's got herself into trouble,' the Colonel said, when Hemmingway had finished. 'She deserves a lesson, though, for going out at a time like this. Respectable people ought to set an example and aid us rather than hinder us in this hellish mess we've got to handle.'

'I know that, sir. But what's done is done, and it's up to me to find her.'

'I'm afraid I can't help you much there. Thousands of women have been brought in; far too many for us to keep any sort of register.'

'I see. But surely you can tell me where your people would have taken her?'

'She'll be in one of the encampments for women. As she was arrested at the Dorchester, the one in the grounds of Buckingham Palace is the most likely.'

'Then I'll try that first, and the others afterwards if necessary. Perhaps your secretary could give me a list of them?'

'Yes. There are seven altogether, but it'll be like looking for a needle in a haystack and, even if you do find out where she is, you won't be able to do anything about it.'

'I want to take her to the country and I imagine, sir, that you'd have no objection to giving me an order for her release?'

A telephone buzzer sounded on the Colonel's desk. He picked up the instrument and was talking down it for the next few moments. When he had done, he turned back to Hemmingway.

'I'm sorry, but that's impossible. Of course, the great major-: ity of the people who have been rounded-up are only drunks; but hundreds of lives have been lost in these riots, property's been destroyed and goods stolen. If the comet doesn't hit us, every one of the prisoners will have to go before a tribunal; some will be charged with manslaughter, others with looting, and so on. But as we have no particulars of what any individual will be charged with yet, it's quite out of the question for us to release anyone.'

'But Lady Curry's not a thief or a murderer.'

'Of course not, my dear fellow, but she must have been arrested for something; even if it was only participating in a riotous assembly. And, until she's been charged and either proved innocent or guilty, we've got to hold her. You must see for yourself that we can't make exceptions.'

'But, Colonel, her cousin was killed before her eyes last night. She's probably half off her head with worry.'

'I'm sorry. But, if she's a hospital case, she'll receive medical attention. Anyway, she'll fare no worse than thousands of others and they're all being fed and looked after. They'll be as safe in the open parks as anywhere. That's why we put them there. They'd be no better off in the open country. Now, I really can't give you any more time.'

Hemmingway saw that it was useless to argue further so he thanked the Colonel for seeing him, obtained from his secretary a list of the women's encampments in the London area, and left the building.

The encampments were scattered far and wide. One was on Wimbledon Common, another in Greenwich Park, a third on Hampstead Heath. The garden of Buckingham Palace was the only one anywhere near West Central London and, as Derek had been taken straight to Hyde Park, it seemed almost certain that Lavina would have been taken to the Palace grounds rather than to one of the more distant camps.

It was getting on for one in the morning as Hemmingway set out at a good pace across Parliament Square and along Birdcage Walk. Outside the Palace, where great multitudes had congregated on the previous nights, there was now only a small crowd of about fifty people. They stood in a ragged line, staring through the railings at the scene that was proceeding in the courtyard.

There, long rows of closed vans were drawn up, numbering, Hemmingway estimated at a rough guess, well over a couple of hundred. Khaki-clad troops were moving about among them and the driver on the box of each was a soldier.

As Hemmingway halted outside one of the main gates it was thrown open and six of the vans drove out. Almost immediately afterwards another fleet came round the corner, from Constitution Hill, and drove in at the other entrance.

'What's going on?' Hemmingway asked one of the onlookers.

'They're evacuating the women,' replied the man, laconic-: ally.

'Hell!' Hemmingway exclaimed. 'D'you know where they're taking them?'

'Not for certain. They do say, though, that they're loading them on to ships down at the Docks because they reckon they'll be safer out at sea. Why? Have you lost your wife or something?'

'Yes,' Hemmingway agreed, to avoid entering into long explanations.

'Thanks very much,' he added, and made off quickly.

This new move on the part of the authorities further complicated his problem. Evidently, the decision to evacuate the women prisoners had been made during the last hour or two and Colonel Hodgson, having been busy upon other matters, either knew nothing about it or had forgotten to mention it. The odds were all in favour of Lavina's having been taken to the Palace garden after her arrest; but was she still there or was she in one of the vans on her way to an unknown destination?

If the latter was the case, Hemmingway knew that his chance of finding her would be rendered almost impossibly slender. His one hope now lay in the fact that the Colonel had said there were several thousand women in the garden. It would take some hours to evacuate them all and, if he could get into the garden at once, there was just a possibility that he might discover her before she was carted off in one of the vans.

The next thing was to get into the gardens. He knew that he stood no chance at all of penetrating to them by the front way, through the Palace Courtyards. The sentries would never let him pass without credentials. He had got to make his way in, therefore, by some illegal method.

The grounds of the Palace formed a rough triangle, with the Palace itself making a blunt apex at the eastern end. The southeastern side of the great walled enclosure was occupied by the Royal Stables, which were certain to be policed, so there was little prospect of getting in there. The north-eastern side ran parallel with Constitution Hill, up to Hyde Park Corner. A narrow belt of railed-off park, only a few feet deep, lay between the roadway and the wall of the Palace garden. As the belt had trees in it, that would certainly provide the best cover for any attempt to scale the wall but, for that very reason, it was almost certain that a chain of police would be keeping every foot of it under observation.

The third side of the triangle ran north and south the whole length of Grosvenor Place, and here the garden wall abutted on the pavement. There was no cover of any kind for anyone who tried to climb it, but the fact that the whole length of the wall was exposed to view rendered it much less likely to be heavily guarded; so Hemmingway decided to make his attempt from that direction.

Turning right, he set olf up Constitution Hill and he saw at once that his surmise, that this side of the Palace grounds would be well watched, had good foundations. He encounered six policemen between the Palace and Hyde Park Corner and he doubted if a cat could have got over the railing—let alone the wall—without having been spotted by one of them.

Rounding the corner of the grounds he proceeded south, down Grosvenor Place, which formed the longest side of the triangle. A shabby woman shambled past him, then the broad pavement stretched away empty as far as he could see, except for two small figures in the far distance.

As he walked on he saw that they were two policemen who were advancing towards him. A long line of lorries, coming up from the direction of Victoria, rumbled past just as he came level with the officers. They took no notice of him and he covered another hundred yards which brought him about half-way down the western base of the triangle with the Palace almost opposite to him at its apex.

Pausing, he looked round and saw that the policemen were walking slowly on. He guessed that when they reached Hyde Park Corner they would turn and come south again; so he had no time to lose. The road was now empty of traffic and he could not see any casual pedestrians on its far side. The street lamps were burning only at half-pressure and every twenty yards the trees growing out of the pavement, being in full leaf threw a good patch of shadow.

Halting beneath one of them, he rapidly unwound his length of clothes-line, with the wooden struts knotted across it, from beneath his coat. At one end he formed a loop; then he ran softly forward to the wall.

If it had been designed for the special purpose of helping unauthorised persons to get over it easily it could not have been better planned. True, it was some twelve feet in height but, instead of having broken-glass on its top, it had a long, iron rail running a foot above it from which spikes protruded in all directions. Originally, perhaps, the spikes had been intended to revolve so that no weight could be attached to them, but many years of rust and coats of paint had now made them immovable.

At the second cast the loop at the end of Hemmingway's line caught over one of the strong, iron spikes. Blessing himself for his forethought in having brought this rough scaling ladder he grabbed at the piece of firewood nearest above his head and swarmed up to it.

Just as he gained the top of the wall and was negotiating the iron rail to which the spikes were attached the policemen reached the end of their beat, turned, and saw him.

'Hi, there!' they shouted in unison. The shrill blast of whistles shattered the silence of the night and they both began to run; but Hemmingway, now perched on the iron rail, unhurriedly drew up his rope-ladder.

Panting and flushed, the policemen arrived below him. 'Come down off there,' bellowed one.

Hemmingway laughed in gentle mockery.

'Come up and get me,' he replied, knowing perfectly well that he had them on toast. They could not reach him except by one of them clambering on the other's shoulder and, if they attempted that, he could slip down on the far side of the wall; while, as there was no gate into the garden for at least five hundred yards in either direction, by the time they got inside he could easily have lost himself among the trees.

'Come down at once!' shouted one of the policemen angrily.

Hemmingway shook his head. 'Please don't excite yourselves. I've no intention of trying to assassinate the King or rob the Palace. I'm just looking for a young woman who's been brought into the encampment. I think, for your own sakes, your wisest plan would be not even to report that you've seen me.'

Having let his rope down on the garden side of the wall, he waved the police a cheerful good night and lowered himself to the ground. A flick of the wrist detached the rope from the spike by which it hung and he re-coiled it round his body in case it might come in useful again later on. He then buttoned his double-breasted jacket about him and set off at a brisk pace through the night-enshrouded garden.

On the west side of the grounds there were many trees, so he had to flash his torch here and there to see where he was going, but he found a path and soon afterwards came upon two of the women prisoners. They were lying side by side under a tree, each wrapped up in a blanket and with their heads upon small, hard pillows such as those which are issued to troops in barracks.

A beam of the torch showed that neither of them was Lavina, so Hemmingway passed on; encountering more and more of these sleeping figures as he advanced.

Here and there couples or groups, still wakeful, sat talking together in low voices and, as his torch picked them out, a few of them called to him; asking the time or just cursing him for flashing his light in their eyes. But, assuming that he was one of the detectives in charge of them, they took no further notice when he did not reply.

Owing to the darkness it was impossible for him to estimate how many women were being kept captive behind the high walls of the huge, rambling garden which covered an area as big as St. James's Park; but the farther he penetrated, the more numerous the women became. As he flashed his light from side to side on each group in turn his progress was slow, but he gradually made his way round the north side of the lake and came out on to the open slope which runs down to it from the terrace at the back of the Palace. Many of the windows at the back of the Palace were still lit and the light they gave was sufficient to disclose a sight that made his heart sink with dismay. The whole great lawn was covered for as far as he could see with figures rolled in blankets.

In the distance, towards its southern end, he saw that there was considerable movement and, picking his way forward among the sleeping forms, he advanced up the slope; still flashing his torch from side to side in the hope of spotting Lavina as he went.

He found that the movement was concentrated round two large marquees where tea and food were being served to any of the women who wanted it in the groups that were being quietly rounded-up for evacuation by a number of Tommies.

Batches of about a hundred prisoners were being roused at a time, passed through the marquees and thence into the southeastern courtyard of the Palace where Hemmingway could just discern some vans.

No one took any notice of him as, in the constantly shifting throng, there were a number of plain-clothes men among the uniformed police, troops and herds of women. Pocketing his torch, he slipped inside one of the marquees, knowing that the light in it would enable him to see more women at one time than he could by flashing his torch about on the people outside.

Behind a long trestle-table a number of well-dressed but tired-looking women were handing out cups of tea, bread and butter and buns to the dejected-looking captives before them. Some of them were bandaged for wounds they had received; the faces of others were tear-stained and drawn with anxiety. All of them were dirty and dishevelled.

In vain Hemmingway searched for Lavina's golden head. She was not among them. Leaving that marquee, he crossed the intervening space and entered the other. The scene was the same; a low murmur of voices, tear-stained and dejected faces. But Lavina was not there either.

It was just as he was going out that the face of one of the ladies behind a tea-urn struck him as familiar, and a second later he realised that it was the Queen. Of course, he thought, since she and the King are remaining in London, she would be here. How tired she's looking, but how splendid.

As he left the tent the batch of captives in it were quietly moved on towards the courtyard. He turned in the other direction and began to flash his torch again among the new groups of women who were being roused for their journey. Nobody questioned him, as many of the officers and police were also using flash-lamps. Now and again his light flickered on golden hair, raising his hopes only to disappoint him, as haggard face after haggard face came for a second into the torch's beam.

He had realised from the beginning that it was useless to ask if anyone had seen her. The only thing he could say was that he was searching for Lady Curry, a slim, good-looking girl of twenty-three, with golden hair and aquiline features. To inquire for her as Lavina Leigh would have been little better as, after her thirty hours as a prisoner, she could hardly now be recognisable as the beautifully-groomed film star.

Again and again Hemmingway ran his eye over fresh batches of women as they were brought into the marquees. In between whiles he returned to the crowded lawn or penetrated as far as the courtyard where the women were being shepherded into the vans. Hundreds of the prisoners had been removed during the time he had been searching, yet only the eastern end of the lawn showed signs that the evacuation was making any progress. Glancing at his watch, he realised that he had been in the grounds for three hours already and it would take hours yet before the whole great garden could be cleared of the thousands of prisoners.

His main hope now was that Lavina might be sleeping in a far part of the garden so that daylight would have come before she was collected into one of the batches. He knew that in the semi-darkness by the marquees he must be missing scores of women as they were led away, however frantically he looked to right and left; whereas, once dawn came, he would be able to scan each batch as it was shepherded into the courtyard. Tired and dispirited by this constant searching, which necessitated his turning his head first one way and then another without intermission, he began to fear that his task was completely hopeless.

At a quarter past four he visited the courtyard again. Another line of closed vans had been drawn up. The women were being helped into them by the soldiers and as each van was filled its door was locked behind them so that they could not jump out when the vans had left the Palace yard.

Suddenly, as the last van in the line of six was being loaded, he caught sight of a slim, golden-haired girl being helped up into it. Although he only glimpsed her for a moment, he felt certain it was Lavina and, all his depression gone in a second, he rushed forward. As he reached the van the last woman scrambled into it; a Guardman slammed-to the door, an Officer locked it and handed the key to a Sergeant.

'Stop!' panted Hemmingway. 'Lady Curry's in that van. I've been searching for her all night.'

The Officer gave him a surprised glance. 'Who're you? What are you doing here?' he asked quickly.

'I've just told you. I've been searching for Lady Curry and I've only just spotted her. Please unlock that door again.'

'Sorry.' The Officer shook his head and signed to the Sergeant who saluted and turned away. 'It's too late now. My orders are to get these women out of here with the least possible delay.'

'But please,' Hemmingway pleaded, as the right-hand van in the line began to move. 'It won't take you a minute to get the key back and unlock that door. She's ill from shock and I've got to get her down to the country.'

'Sorry,' the Officer repeated. 'I couldn't release her, in any case, without an order.'

'Then at least let me speak to her.'

The second and third vans were now moving towards the outer courtyard. The fourth was just about to follow.

'No time now,' the Officer said firmly. 'You can see for yourself the convoy's moving off.'

'Then, for God's sake, let me go with her.'

As Hemmingway spoke the fifth van ran forward and the sixth followed. The Officer shrugged helplessly but, now he had sighted it, Hemmingway was determined not to lose his quarry. Darting past the Officer, he raced the moving van and leapt up on the box beside the driver.

'What the hell?' exclaimed the soldier as Hemmingway subsided, panting, beside him.

'It's all right,' he gasped. 'A friend of mine's inside your van. There was no time to get her out so the Officer said I could come along with you.'

'Oh, in that case . . the driver shrugged. 'Got a cigarette on you?'

Hemmingway produced his case and, as his van followed the convoy out of the front courtyard of the Palace into the Mall, the man took one.

From Trafalgar Square they turned into Northumberland Avenue and headed for the Embankment. As they ran smoothly through the almost deserted streets Hemmingway was considering his next move. Everybody seemed to have a definite order that none of the prisoners were to be released without a written sanction. If he waited until the van got to its destination the probability was that another Officer there would refuse Lavina her freedom. Was it possible to bribe the driver to halt the van on the way down and get her out before they arrived at the place they were bound for?'

'D'y°^u want to earn a Aver?' he asked the man quietly.

'Does a monkey like his nuts?' replied the driver, with a grin.

'Then, it's easy money for you,' Hemmingway went on. 'My girl-friend is inside and yours is the last van in the convoy. Pull up when they turn the corner under the Bridge into Queen Victoria Street as though you'd had engine trouble. Unlock the van so that I can get my girl out, and the fiver's yours with my eternal blessing.'

'No go, Guv'nor,' said the soldier regretfully. 'I don't suppose they'd miss her. What's one piece of skirt in all these truck-loads? And I'd be happy to oblige you, but I haven't got the key.'

'Who has, then?'

'The Sergeant, who's riding on the leading van.'

'Well,' said Hemmingway, thinking of the steel case opener under his coat, which was digging into his ribs now that he was sitting down, 'I shouldn't imagine the lock's very strong. We could break it open.'

'Maybe we could, but we're not going to. Think I'm going to be crimed for busting His Majesty's property and helping prisoners to escape? Not likely!'

'I'll make it a tenner,' Hemmingway offered.

The driver shook his head. 'Sorry, mate, but it can't be done; not if you made it fifty. In ordinary times I might have chanced it for ten or twenty quid—staged a little plot about you knocking me out or something—but in these days it just isn't worth it. They court-martial people for as little as blinkin' an eyelid; though, mind you, with all the trouble they're having and no sleep or anything, I don't blame 'em. But I'm not taking any chances of being popped in a cell because I want to be free to run for it when the old comet arrives.'

Where he proposed to run to he did not specify, but seeing that further attempts to bribe him were quite useless, Hemmingway had to contain his impatience as well as he could for the rest of the journey.

They ran on past the Mansion House, down Comhill, Leadenhall Street and Aldgate, to the East End. In the Commercial Road Hemmingway noticed that many of the shops had been looted; but all was quiet now except for patrolling squads of police and an occasional armoured car rolling by on its solid rubber wheels.

At last they veered south and, a few minutes later, passed through the gates of the West India Dock. Crossing railway lines and bridges, they wound their way between Customs sheds and dark out-buildings until they eventually pulled up on a wharfside to which a big ship was moored. There were a dozen other vans there besides those of the convoy with which Hemmingway had come, and the women from the earlier arrivals were already moving slowly up the gangways under big arc-lights into the ship.

Hemmingway got down, said good-bye to the driver, and waited patiently at the back of the van until the Sergeant came along and unlocked it. The van was pitch-dark inside and a blowsy woman fell out when the doors were opened. As she was helped to her feet she let out a stream of blasphemous curses.

'Steady there,' said the Sergeant. 'Letting fly at us won't do any good.'

An officer who had come up added: 'For your own sakes, as well as ours, please don't make a fuss. We're going to put you in this ship, where you'll be well fed and taken care of. As soon as you're all on board it will take you out into the estuary of the Thames.'

'Little trip to Southend, eh?' said a fat old woman jovially.

'That's it, mother,' laughed the officer. 'We're giving you a holiday for nothing and we want you to make the best of it. You'll be much safer out there in the ship, too, than you would be in London.'

Hemmingway was standing just behind the officer, craning his head to catch the first glimpse of Lavina as she scrambled out of the van. The arc-lamps suddenly glinted upon golden hair. It was a natural blonde, but a second later, he saw the blue-eyed, haggard face beneath it; and his heart seemed to sink into his boots. It was not Lavina.

The Great Evacuation

Although at times Hemmingway felt things very deeply, he was not given to showing his emotions freely. He had learned in adversity that it is only waste of time to lose control of one's feelings, for, like many successful people, he had had a hard struggle in his early days.

His father had been one of those old-fashioned professors who coupled a brilliant brain with a congenital disability to make or keep money. Even when the Professor had left his native city of Cardiff to take up the Chair in Mathematics which he had been offered at a minor American University, and so passed to what was for him comparative affluence, he had consistently fallen a prey to every rogue in the matter of his small investments; and he had an incurable habit of lending money to people who never paid him back. In addition, instead of marrying one of America's ten thousand heiresses, he had married one of America's ten million nice girls who have no money at all.

That she, too, had brains and could write interesting little monographs upon such subjects as Ming porcelain and the use of cosmetics in Ancient Egypt did not materially help the family budget.

In one respect Hemmingway's inheritance was remarkably rich; as he had not only derived a remarkable flair for figures from his father but also a wide knowledge and love of all things beautiful from his mother. But in the material sense they had been able to do practically nothing for him at all.

His parents had been vague, kindly, untidy people, living in a world of ideas that far transcended any sort of social round or even the calls of their own kitchen. They had lived mostly on tinned foods, grudgingly served by a succession of hired helps who despised them for their lack of practicability and robbed them unmercifully, although they never knew it. No one ever came to the house except visiting intellectuals, and when money ran short they just sacked the hired help, barely noticing the difference, and pigged it on their own until they could afford to engage a new one.

In consequence, Hemmingway's childhood had been an exceptionally lonely one. He never went to parties or played with the neighbours' children, so by the time he went to school he had not acquired the common basis upon which most youthful friendships are formed and was already something of a mystic. Added to which, he was mentally so far in advance of the other children of his age that they either disliked or were vaguely frightened of him. Only the fact that he was physically strong saved him from serious bullying, and after a time his schoolfellows were content to leave him to himself.

On the other hand, this isolation had its advantages; since, if his parents neglected him in other respects, they watched and tended the development of his brain with all the loving care that any horticulturist ever lavished on a black tulip.

Fortunately for all concerned, he loved reading and took to learning like a duck to water; so that during those countless hours when he should have been playing Redskins or Robbers with his contemporaries he was mastering subjects which few boys study until they have reached the University. He took scholarship examinations as a joke, so his education was little strain upon his thriftless parents; but it was after he had passed out of the University that his real troubles began.

It is one thing to have brains and quite another to convert them into money. He was a lanky, untidy youth in ill-fitting clothes. He lacked every social grace and had not even attempted to master the simplest sports. Moreover, he had not a single friend in the world who could be counted on to assist his advancement, except those connected with the scholastic profession; and that, with the example of his father before him, he was determined not to enter.

Although his reading had covered a multitude of subjects by no means all of them had been of a learned nature. Through autobiographies and magazines he was just as familiar with the social functions of a London Season as he was with the quantum theory; and, quite definitely, he wanted to qualify by means of money, personality and achievement for a place among the ruling classes of the Anglo-Saxon world. Yet, how

to set about it he had not the faintest idea.

Having no money, he decided to travel; which may sound a paradox, but is certainly not so in the case of a young man brought up in the United States. For two terms he slaved as a junior usher—a job he hated—at a local day school; but it enabled him to save enough to pay his fare to Europe, and during the next eighteen months he hiked through a dozen countries.

He found it intensely interesting to see the historic places of which he had read. Contact with people of various nationalities broadened his views immensely, and it enabled him to get into true perspective the political theories that he had formulated. But at the end of that time he suddenly woke up to the fact that, although tramping from city to city and doing odd jobs for a week or two here and there in order to earn his keep provided an excellent appendix to his magnificent education, it simply was not getting him anywhere at all. He was just as far from a seat in the Houses of Parliament or on the Board of the Bank of England as he had been two years before on leaving his University, and certainly no nearer to the Royal Enclosure at Ascot.

After a spell of work as translator for a German publisher in Bremen he had made enough to pay his passage home, and he settled in New York with the determination to carve out a career for himself just as millions of young men had done before him.

Yet that was far easier determined than accomplished. Apart from physical labour, teaching and translating seemed to be his only marketable assets. He wrote some short stories and a novel, but no one would take them. It seemed that he had not that kind of mind. He made few friends, although he gradually bettered his appearance and was quick to pick up social mannerisms on the rare occasions when he was able to mix with moneyed people of culture.

For three years he maintained a bitter struggle, taking job after job to keep himself alive, but he chucked one after the other directly he realised that each was nothing but a blind alley and had saved a few weeks' rent.

Towards the end of that time he took a job as a professional guide to a New York tourist agency. He knew the city well by then, and few people could have done better justice to the Art collections and antiques in its museums. In taking the job he had hoped that he would at least come into contact with a number of interesting people and, perhaps, improve himself by going about with them; but he was bitterly disappointed.

Nine out of ten of the visitors whom he had to take round were idle, stupid people with more money than sense. The magnificent Egyptian collection in the Metropolitan Museum bored them to tears. Most of them did not know a Van Dyck from a Reubens, and when he took them to the Indian Museum, where treasures can be seen from the whole American continent which have no counterpart in any European collection, they grumbled bitterly because it was six miles from the centre of the city and they considered the time involved in a visit practically wasted.

All that most of them wanted to see was the view from the top of the Empire State Building, the great cinemas and stores, and, particularly, the night haunts. Both women and men kept him up taking them to places until the small hours of the morning, so that he found himself jaded and exhausted when he had to report to the office to take on another sightseer at 10 o'clock the following morning.

He made up his mind to chuck that too as soon as he had saved enough in tips—which was practically all he got out of it—to lay off for a little and look for something else. But, all unknown to him, his lucky star was just about to appear above the horizon.

Sir Samuel Curry had been in New York on a business trip-Negotiations had hung fire owing to the illness of an American steel king and were not completed until 'Sam' had missed his boat by a couple of hours; so he had found himself in New York with nothing to do for three days until he could leave for England on the next.

He had often visited New York before but it occurred to him now that it might be rather an idea to see something of the place outside its social life, which he already knew well-He decided that, anyhow, he would devote a day to looking round; the other two could easily be passed with the host of hospitable Americans who had only to be rung up and would be delighted to entertain him.

The hotel had a tie-up with the agency with which Hemmingway worked, so he was sent along to report to Sam and they spent the day together. Sam was not really a brilliant man. His success was due to clear-headedness, honesty in his business dealings, a colossal capacity for hard work, and a flair for employing people in the right places who were more gifted than himself.

When they parted that evening Sam had not rung up any of his American friends with the idea of filling in his next two days. Instead, he told Hemmingway to report again the following morning. He had been struck by the unusual way in which Hemmingway quite casually assessed artistic trends and ancient customs in terms of money.

Having found, for once, an interested listener, he explained, while taking Sam round the museums, how changes of climate had made or wrecked historic markets; how fortunes had been made by modern designers who were clever enough to study and adopt ancient fashions; how the germ of every modern invention had preceded it by hundreds of years, but remained undeveloped through lack of initiative or capital. But always there was that quiet preoccupation with finance applied to encyclopaedic knowledge—the kind of knowledge that not one financier in a thousand possessed.

On the second night Sam kept Hemmingway to dine with him at the Ritz Carlton, and they talked upon a multitude of subjects which did not ordinarily come into the sphere of a professional guide. By that time Sam was absolutely convinced that in this tall, wise-eyed young man he had got something; and details never mattered to Sam once he had made up his mind about a thing. When they parted that night he said:

'Tell the agency tomorrow morning that you're leaving. I'll Pay them compensation if necessary. Here's a thousand dollars to pay any bills you may have and buy any odds-and-ends you want. Pack your bag and meet me here at 8 o'clock tomorrow night. The Normandie sails at 10 and I'm taking you with me to Europe.'

Hemmingway's big chance had come. He asked no questions, neither did he give way to the immense elation he felt and pour out a spate of jumbled thanks. He just gave that sudden radiant smile of his and said:

'Thank you, sir. I'll be here.'

From that moment Hemmingway was made. On the voyage back Sam saw that he was no young man to put into an ordinary job, however good. He was so vastly knowledgeable, so sound in all his views, that he would be infinitely more valuable as an ideas man and an assessor before whom to place all sorts of knotty problems for a fresh, clear, logical opinion.

When Hemmingway arrived in London he stepped into another world—the world he had dreamed of for years. Sam installed him in St. James's Square, introduced him to his friends, and taught him the intricacies of his many businesses. Soon Hemmingway was formulating a score of new schemes for investing Sam's surplus profits, and Sam found himself never taking any major decision without talking it over with him first.

Very wisely Sam never made him a director of any of his companies, as he did not want Hemmingway's energies dissipated in the tiresome routine of board meetings. He worked alone in his room at St. James's Square and remained, outwardly, no more than Sam's private secretary; but within a few months he had mastered the essentials of Sam's innumerable interests, and in the following seven years he made him another million.

His salary was princely and, with the handsome presents that Sam made him after every successful deal they pulled off together, he now had many thousands of pounds' worth of investments of his own. That Sam would do nothing without him was known in big business circles; so, in spite of his lack of official position in any of the companies, he had power, influence and prestige.

Hemmingway never forgot that he owed it all to Sam, and that was why he was so intensely worried about Lavina. He liked her personally for a variety of reasons. She was beautiful to look at, which pleased his artistic eye; and, although he had really seen very little of her, he had already discovered that she was much better read than most young women. Further, he had soon discerned that under her gay and almost flighty manner she possessed real character.

Some people had shaken their heads when they heard that Sam was marrying a beautiful girl nearly twenty-five years younger than himself, but, as soon as Hemmingway had had a chance to sum Lavina up, he had come to the conclusion that Sam's friends had no real cause to worry. Whether the marriage would prove lasting it was impossible to say, but he felt quite convinced that Lavina was intrinsically a decent person. Whatever she might do later if Sam proved incapable of holding her affections, she would not make a fool of him or get herself talked about behind his back; and that to Hemmingway was the really important thing about modern marriage.

His may have been a cynical view, but it was based upon the only principle to which he had ever adhered: that it didn't matter very much what people did providing they never betrayed a trust or let each other down.

That was what troubled him so as he stood gloomily on the dockside in the early hours of the morning. Derek and Roy might be considered as the people really responsible for getting Lavina to Stapleton, but, since one was dead and the other hors de combat, that responsibility had, he felt, devolved on him the previous night.

Sam so patently adored his young wife and Hemmingway knew him so intimately that he felt it would absolutely break him up if Lavina could not be found before the arrival of the comet. In his failure to trace her he was letting Sam down, and it was Sam who had given him everything for which he had always longed.

The convoy of vans was now empty and the last of the women from them were making their way up the gangways of the ship. Should he get a lift on one of the vans, if they were going back to the Palace, or should he remain there at the docks watching the new arrivals? If he went back, he might pass Lavina in one of the numerous convoys which must be on their way to the East End at the moment. The journey back, too, meant wasting precious time when he might be scanning faces in the hope of finding hers; from that point of view it seemed better to remain where he was. On the other hand, it was improbable that all the convoys were arriving at the West India Dock. Many of them would doubtless be dispatched to others and he could not be at half a dozen docks at once.

It was a horrible dilemma, but another convoy was already arriving, and with every batch of women that he could see there came another chance of spotting Lavina, so he walked over at once to the place where the new arrivals were unloading.

As he reached them a big Buick drove up alongside of him, Its chauffeur was a naval Petty Officer and a naval Staff Cap. tain jumped out of the back immediately it drew to a halt.

Hemmingway's face suddenly brightened. Here, at last, was somebody he knew, and he called out excitedly:

'Renshaw! Renshaw!'

'Why, if it isn't Hemmingway Hughes!' exclaimed the N.O, 'What the devil are you doing here?'

'I'm in a hell of a fix.' Hemmingway grabbed him by the arm. 'Sam Curry's wife was arrested two nights ago because she happened to be at the Dorchester when a riot started. God knows where they've taken her! But I've got to find her somehow and get her down to Sam, who's expecting us both in Surrey.'

'I see.' Captain Renshaw rubbed his nose thoughtfully with one finger. 'D'you know where she was taken after her arrest?'

'No. But, presumably, Buckingham Palace, as that was the nearest camp for women prisoners. I've spent the best part of the night in the grounds, but there's such thousands of women there that I couldn't have seen more than one in ten. Then I thought I spotted her being put into one of these vans and came down with the driver on the box. But it turned out to be the wrong woman.'

'I wish I could help you, old chap, but I don't see how I can.'

'Are you in charge of things here?'

'The Admiralty's taken over all shipping and are responsible for this evacuation by water of the women in the camps. My job is to see the Buckingham Palace lot safely off.'

'Are they all going from this dock?'

'Lord, no! We're using every dock in London.'

'But not at the same time, surely?'

'Oh, no. As soon as we fill a ship we direct the convoys by wireless to another dock.'

'Then, at least you know where they'll be embarking the women from the Palace when they've finished here.'

'Yes.' Renshaw shuffled some papers and looked at a list.

•We're filling the S.S. Halcyon in the East India Dock next. As soon as I've finished here you can come with me if you like.'

'Thanks. That's darn good of you.'

For the next ten minutes Hemmingway stood aside while Renshaw received reports, checked lists, and signed documents. Then the two of them got into the Buick and drove round to the East India Dock.

On the way Hemmingway said: 'There's another thing. If 1 do find her, she'll still be under arrest. Is there any way I can persuade the authorities to release her?'

Renshaw laughed. 'My dear fellow, once the women are handed over to us by the Military on the dockside, I'm the authority concerned; so there won't be any trouble about that. If she's committed a murder or anything, I may be called on to answer for her afterwards, but I hardly think Sam's wife would have done anything of that kind, so I'm game to chance it.'

'Well, that's a load off my mind,' Hemmingway sighed. 'The next thing is to find her. If only she hasn't been shipped off before I got down here.'

At the East India Dock more vans were already arriving and scores more women, some dumb with distress, others screaming protests, were being embarked on another ship. There was a chance that Lavina might have been sent on board, but Captain Renshaw dealt with that possibility by walking over to a police car which had a loud-sepaker attachment on its top.

After a few words with the Inspector who was in it the loudspeaker began to boom: 'Lady Curry! Lady Curry! Will Lady Curry report to this car at once if she is on S.S. Halcyon or on the dockside.'

When the loud-speaker had been calling for a little time without result they came to the conclusion that Lavina was not on board, or else too distraught by her experiences even to be conscious that someone was searching for her.

More and more convoys arrived, and as each was unloaded the loud-speaker blared its message again. For half an hour Hemmingway stood beside Captain Renshaw watching the embarkation; and then, at last, his heart gave a sudden thump of excitement. A slim, golden-headed figure detached itself from the crowd and came walking slowly towards them.

'Lavina!' he cried, as he ran to meet her. 'Lavina 1'

F

She did not increase her pace. Under the arc-lamps he saw-that her face was deadly pale and that her footsteps dragged wearily. As he reached her she halted, extended both her hands, gave a faint smile and suddenly collapsed upon his chest, weeping hysterically.

He half-led, half-carried her to Renshaw's Buick and, get-ting her inside, began to pat her hands and soothe her as well as he could.

'It's all right,' he murmured. 'It's all right now we've found you. You're with friends, and you've got nothing more to worry about.'

'Oh, Hemmingway!' she sighed, recovering a little. 'I can't tell you how glad I am to see you. I've had a frightful time, simply frightful! And poor Roy was killed. Did you know?'

'Yes, yes. Derek told me all about it.'

'Is he—is he all right?'

'Yes. They took him to a camp in Hyde Park where he was half-murdered and robbed; but he managed to escape when everybody went wild just after sunset last night. I put him to bed when he got to St. James's Square and came out to look for you myself.'

'Oh, bless you!' She turned a pathetic, tear-stained little face up to him. and her eyes seemed much larger than usual. 'Sam always said that you were a wonderful person and now I know it's true. I can't think how you managed to trace me, but it's heaven to see that big forehead of yours and those queer eyes you've got, again.'

'I almost gave up hope when I started to hunt through that huge crowd in the grounds of Buckingham Palace,' Hemmingway smiled.

'You were there, then?'

'Yes. I got in over the wall, but I couldn't find you. Actually, we have to thank Captain Renshaw that you're here with me now. We have to thank him, too, for having promised to release you from arrest.'

Renshaw, who was standing by the open door of the car, touched his gold-braided cap and grinned. 'I hope I'm not compounding the escape of a felon. You haven't pinched the Crown Jewels or anything, have you?'

She smiled at him and held out a slender hand. 'No. I was only one of the drunks and disorderlies. If you'll let me off, I'll promise never to do it again. I'm most terribly grateful to you.'

'Oh, it's nothing,' he took her hand and pressed it. "I'm delighted to have been able to help you, Lady Curry. Sam's an old friend of mine. But may I ask what you mean to do now?'

'Sam's down at Stapleton, Lady Curry's old home near Dorking,' Hemmingway said. 'He must be half-frantic by this time from not knowing what's happened to her. Somehow or other I must get her down to Stapleton just as soon as I can.'

'I wonder if that would be best?' Renshaw said thoughtfully. 'God knows what this comet's going to do to us! I'm not in the habit of getting the wind up, but I did after sundown last night. We don't often see an Admiral kissing his lady secretary before all and sundry; but that's how it was. And when the telephone started to ring I picked it up and smashed the bally thing myself. Just couldn't help it. I simply had to. They'll dock it off my pay, I expect. But it's a pretty unnerving business and, in my opinion, the safest place to see this party through would be in a ship.'

'What d'you suggest, then?' Hemmingway asked.

'Well, anything might happen to you between here and Dorking, so, in my view, your best plan would be to take Lady Curry on board the Halcyon right away. She'll be sailing in half an hour, and out in the estuary of the Thames you'll be as well placed as anywhere when the comet does its stuff. I'll see the Captain, if you like, and the N.O. who'll be officially in command. We'll fix it that they give you the best accommodation that's to be had.'

'But I must get back to Sam,' said Lavina quickly.

Hemmingway nodded. 'Yes. That's the trouble. And, as & matter of fact, we've got a sort of Ark down at Dorking— one of the new spherical life-boats that they've been using in the States. Our chances ought to be as good in that as anywhere; and I just can't think what Sam might do if his wife Was still missing when the party started.'

'In that case,' Renshaw agreed, 'the sooner you get there, the better.'

'Then we'll be moving.' Hemmingway disentangled himself

from Lavina, and she followed him out of the car.

They thanked Renshaw again, wished him luck, and began to walk towards the gates of the dock.

It was now half-past five in the morning and dawn was breaking. Having found Lavina, and found her sane, Hemmingway was much more cheerful; but, as they advanced, he was aware that only the last shreds of her courage were keeping her from collapsing. Although she was clinging to his arm her feet faltered as she walked, and it was only with an effort that she could raise her head.

'Did you get any sleep at all?' he asked after a moment.

'I don't know. I think so, in between whiles. But I couldn't get the sight—the sight of Roy, lying there dead on the floor of the ballroom, out of my mind. I've lost count of time entirely. I don't even know what day it is. I didn't cry, you know—not even once—until I saw you. Somehow I couldn't. And now I have, I'm feeling better. But I'd give the earth just to tumble into bed.'

Her utter exhaustion provided Hemmingway with a new problem. There was no public transport running by which he could get her back to St. James's Square, and no possibility of hiring a car; yet she was quite incapable of walking such a distance. The only solution seemed to be the finding of some accommodation where she could get a few hours' sleep while he went to St. James's Square and collected his car.

He thought of the Salvation Army Hostel outside the West India Dock, but Lavina's footsteps were faltering, she was dragging on his arm, and the Hostel was a mile away; so even that seemed too far off. Coming out of the dock gates they turned left along the East India Dock road, and on a corner he saw a little hotel called the 'Main Brace'. Its principal business was obviously done through its bar, but it had a sign hanging outside announcing 'BED AND BREAKFAST'.

He did not like the look of the place at all, as it was only the sort of water-front dive where, in that district, sailors of all nations normally congregate. But Lavina was now weighing on his arm so heavily that she obviously could not go much farther.

The hotel was shut and no one was about, so Hemmingway went to the side door and rang the bell. He kept on ringing for some moments and was beginning to think that the publican had taken his family out of London and left the place untenanted; but at last there was a shuffling inside and a corpulent man in a greasy dressing-gown threw open the door.

'Can you give this lady a bed for a few hours?' Hemmingway asked. 'She's been through a great deal and I must leave her somewhere to get some sleep while I go and collect my car.'

The fat man nodded. 'She can have six beds if she wants 'em. The 'ouse is empty except for me and the Missis, now.'

'One's enough,' Hemmingway smiled. 'But let it be the best you've got; and I'll make it well worth your while to see that she's not disturbed till I get back.'

'Oh, she'll be orl right,' the man shrugged. 'Nobody's goin' to interfere with 'er. Why should they? Tvvo-and-six is the charge, pay in advance—unless she wants breakfast, and that's another bob.'

Comforted somewhat by the man's apparent honesty, Hemmingway produced a ten-shilling note. 'You can take this on account,' he said, 'and there'll be another like it if the lady's had a good sleep by the time I get back.'

'Thanks, guv'nor.' The publican thrust the ten-shilling note into the pocket of his dressing-gown. 'Follow me, will yer?' He turned and led the way upstairs.

The hallway smelt of stale cabbage. The stair carpet was threadbare and the paper on the walls faded with age. But the landlord led them to a room on the first floor overlooking the street, which, while unpretentious, looked reasonably clean.

A big, old-fashioned, brass bedstead occupied nearly half of it while a marble-topped washstand with a jug of water and coarse-looking towels was wedged in one corner, Hemmingway noted with satisfaction that the door had a key on the inside. The second Lavina entered it, she collapsed upon the bed.

'Poor lady's in a shockin' state, ain't she?' said the landlord. 'Like me to get the Missis up an' give 'er a nice cup o' tea or somethin'?'

Hemmingway shook his head. 'No, thanks all the same. All she needs is sleep.'

The man nodded, and shuffled out of the door. 'So long, then. Tell 'er just to give a shout if she wants anything. You can find yer own way out an' I'll let you in again when you get back.'

As the publican closed the door behind him, Hemmingway looked down at Lavina. Dark circles showed under her eyes and her eyelids were blue, as though she had made them up but actually from exhaustion. She was certainly all-in.

He shook her by the shoulder. 'Look here, we'll have to set off for Stapleton directly I get back from St. James's Square with the car. It's no good just flopping down like that with your clothes on. You must undress and get into bed so as to get as much real rest as possible out of the short time you've got.'

Lavina blinked up at him wearily. 'I can't, Hemmingway, I'm too tired. I can hardly stand up.'

'Now, do be sensible. It won't take you a moment to slip out of your things.'

She raised herself on one arm. 'All right. If you'll help me.'

Hemmingway was not used to undressing young women. He was not in the least a prude but his complete lack of social life and his preoccupation with learning when young had kept him right out of the sphere of the girls in his own home town. While he had been struggling to earn his living in New York he had had an unfortunate affair with a girl who had let him down extremely badly; and it had gone so deep that for a long time afterwards he had studiously shunned all feminine advances. Since then, although he had met many pretty women in Sam's company, his whole heart had been in his work. He and Sam travelled a certain amount but, even in the luxury resorts they sometimes visited, there were always big deals in progress, cables to be decoded, long-distance telephone calls coming through and schemes to be thought out for the development of this or that business, and Hemmingway never found himself particularly attracted to the elegant, but so often empty-headed, young women that he met in such places.

Women, too, were a little frightened of him; yet, had they known the truth, he was much more frightened of them when they did attract him; so, while he was not actually cold, he had fallen into the habit of never attempting to go further with them than casual friendship. The fact was that he no longer thought about women as women and was so absorbed in Sam's affairs that he had more or less drifted into the same sort of celibacy as that of a worldly priest who has fought and conquered all desire.

Lavina caught the rather queer look on his face and, exhausted as she was, could not repress a flicker of amusement at his shyness. Her three years on the films had long since accustomed her to acting, often in the scantiest of costumes, before crowds of technicians and lookers-on. She was very proud of her beautiful body and rather liked to show it off whenever she could do so without positive immodesty; so it had not even occurred to her that Hemmingway would be embarrassed by helping her shed her outer garments.

His hesitation was only momentary. As she slid off the bed and, crossing her arms, plucked at the hem of her frock he quickly took hold of it and pulled it over her head. Then, as she sank down again, he unlaced her shoes, took them off and helped her roll down her stockings.

'Thanks. That'll do,' she murmured. 'I'll wriggle out of my body-belt somehow when you've gone; my chemise will have to do as a nightie.'

He pulled out his gun and showed it to her. 'Ever handled one of these things?'

She nodded. 'Yes, often in my film days but only with blanks.'

'Right. It's fully loaded. Just in case someone starts something while I'm away I'll leave it with you; and you'd better lock the door. Don't open it to anyone until I get back. The landlord seems a decent guy, but you never know in a place like this.'

Turning his back to her he went over to the mantelpiece ahd scribbled a note on an odd piece of paper from his pocket. It ran:

7 didn't want to scare you unnecessarily but accidents are more frequent than usual these days. If it's after midday when you wake and I'm not back you'll know I've slipped up. In that case give the landlord his other ten shillings, go along to the docks and get yourself taken on one of the ships. There were ^so many prisoners that they're certain to be still evacuating People then. 'Ill have to be a hospital case or in the can myself before I fail you; but, if I have to, best of luck! H.H.'

He laid the message and a little wad of pound-notes under the automatic. When he turned again Lavina had already crawled between the sheets and was just dropping off to sleen but he roused her up and made her get out of bed for a moment to ensure her locking the door after him.

'Happy dreams!' he said with a smile. 'I'll be back in less than a couple of hours and we'll be off to the country.'

'Bless you!' she said, and closed the door behind him.

Out in the street Hemmingway set off at a brisk pace westward. Although he had been up all night, finding Lavina had acted as a tonic to him and, after the frowsty atmosphere of the public house bedroom, the fresh morning air lent him new strength.

Outside a church a hoarding which bore the legend, IF YOUR KNEES KNOCK TOGETHER KNEEL ON THEM, caught his eye and he took off his mental hat to the stouthearted parson who was sticking to his ship with such an appropriate slogan nailed to the mast. Except where they were still evacuating cases from the East End Maternity Hospital few people were moving in the streets and the Commercial Road seemed interminable, but at last he reached Whitechapel High Street and there he saw an event which gave him furiously to think.

One of the very few private cars he had seen that morning was coming down it, moving east, when a group of toughs ran out into the roadway in front of it. The car slowed up. The people in it, who appeared to be a middle-class family, were unceremoniously pulled out and, piling into it, the six or eight roughs drove off, leaving its owner cursing in the gutter.

It was quite understandable that East Enders should be just as anxious as anyone else to get out of London to the greater safety of the countryside but a little disconcerting to find that some of them were using such high-handed methods. He might be faced with the same sort of trouble himself when he drove back to pick up Lavina; so he determined that directly he entered the East End he would ignore all limits and lights. The police were much too occupied to bother about motoring offences and it was better to risk a crash than the loss of the car.

In Cannon Street he was lucky enough to strike a convoy of food lorries proceeding West which had just collected a supply of fish from Billingsgate, and seizing his chance as the last one rumbled by he ran out into the roadway, caught the tailboard and pulled himself up on to the load of boxed fish.

The lorries turned right, east of St. Paul's, into Newgate Street and rumbled through Holborn, so Hemmingway guessed that they were probably heading for Hyde Park. As they passed the top end of Bond Street he dropped off and, with renewed energy after his free ride, strode out down it towards Piccadilly.

It was five to seven when he arrived at St. James's Square. Letting himself in with his key, he went straight upstairs to his bedroom to rouse Derek; but directly he opened the door he saw that Derek was no longer there.

He was not in the bathroom either, and his clothes had gone; so, after having visited the kitchen and called his name loudly several times, Hemmingway concluded that he must have left the house.

Derek was a countryman and used to early rising; moreover, he had passed most of the previous day asleep in the Park. Evidently he had wpken about six, found himself much better after his night in bed and felt too restless to remain indoors; but Hemmingway was justifiably annoyed, because he had definitely told him that he was not to go out.

Now he had, it meant either waiting for his return, which would delay picking up Lavina and getting away into the country, or having to leave him behind.

It was on coming up from the kitchen that Hemmingway noticed a letter addressed to himself propped up on the hall table. He tore it open and read:

'I'm still feeling pretty groggy but better after a good sleep. 1 can't stay here doing nothing, though, as I'm so terribly worried about Lavina. I'm going out to see if I can find her and, if I don't have any luck, I'll get back this evening round about ten ⁰ clock. If you haven't had any either, we'll consult then as to 'he best thing to do; but, if one of us has run her to earth in 'he meantime, we can all drive down to Stapleton tonight.'

Hemmingway rarely gave way to temper but, as he tore the note slowly across, his eyes were narrowed and his teeth were clenched. If Derek had been there he would have hit him, hi_s annoyance was so intense. The whole wretched muddle had been Derek's fault in the first place, for not having been firm with Lavina at the Dorchester two nights before; and now he had messed everything up again.

If Hemmingway was not back at the 'Main Brace' by midday and Lavina woke to find his note, she would at once assume that some accident had befallen him and, leaving the pub, go down to the docks where all trace of her would be lost again.

There was only one thing for it. Lavina was the person who mattered; not Derek. He must darned well take care of himself; it was his own funeral now how he got out of London. Going into the lounge, Hemmingway wrote a brief note himself:

7 have found Lavina but I had to leave her at a pub in the East End. If I'm not back there by midday with the car, she'll read a note I left, think something has happened to me and, according to instructions, go off on her own. If you had remained here as I told you to, this mess-up would not have occurred. As it is, I'm afraid you'll have to get down to Staple-ton on your own as best you can. H.H.'

He propped it up on the table in the hall, where Derek's note had been, collected the satchel of private papers from his room and, leaving the house, went round to the mews at the back to get his car.

As he pulled out his key to unlock the garage door he noticed with sudden apprehension that the lock on it had been broken. Pulling the door open, he saw that the car had gone. Scrawled in chalk on the inner side of the door were the words: 7 hope you don't mind, I've borrowed your car. Derek.'

Mopping his brow with his pocket handkerchief Hemmingway damned Derek to all eternity.

Lavina Shoots to Kill

It was still only a little after seven so Hemmingway had at least the consolation that he had plenty of time to get back to Lavina before midday, even if he had to walk the whole distance.

His stolen lift on the lorry coming up had enabled him to do the journey in just under an hour and he could cover the six odd miles back on foot in two hours, or less if he hurried; but the problem now was, how the devil was he going to get Lavina to the country without a car?

Any attempt to hire one was out of the question. All the hire companies and taxi-cabs had been taken over by the Government for the purposes of the evacuation, while practically everybody who had a private car and was not detained in London on some official duty had used it to get his own family away; so, apart from vehicles in use by the various Services, London now was virtually stripped of motor transport.

Yet Hemmingway knew that he could not expect Lavina to walk the thirty odd miles from the East End of London to Stapleton. She was a healthy girl and, although she was much too lazy and uninterested in sport to make a fetish of exercise, the activities demanded by her film work had kept her fit, so that in normal circumstances she might conceivably have made the journey; but definitely not right on top of the strain and exhaustion of the last two days.

Like those modern military experts who are sometimes haunted by the thought of their entire forces being immobilised by a petrol shortage, Hemmingway pondered for a moment on the possibility of finding horses, only to realise immediately that all horse-drawn vehicles had also been pressed into service to aid in the evacuation. Fortunately, however, he possessed a sense of humour, and the mental picture of himself driving a handsome cab down to the East End did much to mitj. gate his mounting exasperation.

There was only one thing for it. Derek had borrowed his car so he must borrow, or rather steal, somebody else's. He did not like the idea a little bit, although it was not the moral aspect of the matter that troubled him. In such an emergency he considered that he would be perfectly justified in doing all sorts of things that he would never have dreamed of in normal times.

What did perturb him was the fact that, having evacuated the Capital, the Government's principal concern now was to prevent looting. He had listened-in to the stringent regulations issued over the wireless on the previous day. As the country was under martial law, any persons discovered attempting to break into enclosed premises, or in the act of looting, were to be summarily dealt with by courts martial and, if they attempted to resist arrest, the police and troops had authority to fire upon them.

If he endeavoured to steal a car and got caught in the act, that would be the end of any hope of collecting Lavina and getting her down to Stapleton. Yet he saw that he must take the risk.

The next thing was, where was there any likelihood of there being a car which he might annex? He could go to one of the Government depots, try bluffing the people in charge into believing that he was an A.R.P. warden and, perhaps, get a car in that way; but the odds seemed pretty heavy against such a scheme succeeding, and, anyhow, he didn't like it. The idea of stealing a Government vehicle which might later be needed for saving lives went too much against the grain.

Every motor showroom and public garage had already been cleared of its contents, so the only other line seemed to be a car which somebody might have left in a private lock-up. Such vehicles, he knew, were now very few and far between but there must be some which their owners still had under lock and key either because, like himself, their departure had been delayed or because they happened to have been out of England when the crisis had arisen.

He realised then that the most likely place to find such a laid-up car was right in the mews where he was standing. In ordinary times, at this hour of the morning, the chauffeurs would have been just getting up and starting to clean their cars for the day's work, but there wasn't a single person stir-_rj_ng in the mews at the moment nor any sound proceeding from the flats above the garages. In nearly all of them the blinds were drawn and there was little doubt that most of the chauffeurs and their families had left London with their employers. Yet only the very rich can afford to live in the mansions of St. James's Square and very rich people nearly always possess several cars. Sam, for example, had four. It was, therefore, quite on the cards that one of the neighbours might have left behind at least one of his cars.

Hemmingway promptly began to hunt round in his mind for the person in the block whose garage would offer the best prospects for raiding. On the right lived Lord Allenfield, the great newspaper magnate. His legion of secretaries and hangers-on would have seen to it that all his cars were utilised for some purpose or other. The next house was empty. On the left lived Charlotte, Countess of Duffeldown, an old lady of eighty. Her only vehicle, Hemmingway was almost certain, was an incredibly aged Rolls and he had seen her drive away in it, with mountains of luggage, two days before. But the next one on the left offered much better prospects. It belonged to Julius Guggen-baum, the South African millionaire. He had been in South Africa for the last three months and, as he was a bachelor, the house had been shut up on his departure; so there seemed a really good chance that he might have left one or more cars laid up in his garage.

Hemmingway looked anxiously up and down the mews and stood listening intently for a moment, but the silence of the early morning remained unbroken.

Pulling the steel case-opener from under his rope-ladder belt he inserted it under the hinge of the padlock on Mr. Julius Guggenbaum's garage door. Forcing it down he threw all his weight upon it and wrenched out the screws.

He had hardly done so when a voice called: 'Hi!'

Turning, he saw two policemen entering the north end of the mews. His impulse was to run, but the mews was not a long °ne and the policemen were only about a hundred yards away. Even if he could outdistance them they would blow their Whistles as they gave chase. It was almost certain that before he could elude them in the deserted streets he would be headed off by police arriving from other directions. With an effort of will he controlled his impulse and, turning, walked towards the rapidly-advancing constables.

'Well! What is it?' he asked sharply.

'That garage door,' said one of the officers. 'We observed you breaking the lock.'

'Yes. What about it?'

They were a little taken aback by his self-assurance but the other man braced himself and said firmly:

'You know the emergency regulations. It's a serious matter breaking into places these days. We shall have to take you into custody and hand you over to the Military.'

Hemmingway laughed, although he did not feel at all like laughing. 'You'll look a pretty couple of fools if you do. There's no law to stop a man breaking into his own premises, is there?'

'Well, of course, that's different,' conceded the spokesman of the pair, 'but you'll have to satisfy us that this is your garage.'

'Certainly,' Hemmingway smiled. 'Actually, it's Sir Samuel Curry's; but I'm his secretary. Sir Samuel left for the country yesterday but I had to stay behind to sort out his papers.' He held up the fat satchel. 'Unfortunately, he was so busy when he left that he forgot to hand over the key of the garage, so I've had to break it open to get out my own car.'

'I see. That sounds all right. But you won't mind our asking, sir, just in the way of duty, to give us some proof that you really do belong here.'

'Not a bit. The best proof I can offer you is to suggest that you come round to the house with me and have a drink. I dare say you chaps could do with one, now you're on duty day and night like this.'

'That's very kind of you, sir.' The constable glanced at his companion. 'We're living in strenuous times these days so we don't mind if we do.'

Hemmingway led them back to the house; praying as he did so that it would not occur to them to count the number of garages in the mews and tumble to it that the Curry mansion did not back on to the garage that he had been caught breaking into.

Having let them into the house he filled two glasses two-thirds full of whisky and added a splash of soda to each. Then, with his back to his guests, he mixed himself another in almost the opposite proportions. He had entertained police officers before on a few occasions, and had a fair idea of their capacity. He was not disappointed. Both of them swallowed their drinks without turning a hair.

When they had emptied their glasses he asked them if they would like another, but they both shook their heads, so he said cheerfully:

'Well, if you're satisfied about me now, I must be getting along.'

'Yes. Everything's O.K., sir, and many thanks for the drinks,' replied the spokesman. Both now appeared in an excellent humour.

At the front door Hemmingway hoped he would be able to rid himself of them; but it wasn't going to be quite as easy as all that. With their long, unhurried strides they accompanied him back to the garage and, as he put his hand on the door to open it, a sudden, appalling thought struck him. What was going to happen if there was no car inside after all?

Taking a deep breath, he pulled the door open. To his immense relief a big Rolls and a Ford were inside; but both of them were chocked up and all their metal work was protected by sacking.

The senior constable gave Hemmingway a suspicious glance. 'You don't seem to have used either of your cars much lately, do you, sir?'

'No.' Hemmingway plunged in boldly again. 'We keep half a dozen, and the ones in regular use have already gone to the country. They've landed me with the job of getting one of these going. I only hope to God they've left me some petrol.'

The suspicions of the police were apparently allayed once more and, to Hemmingway's inward amusement, the two constables set to with a will helping him to prepare the car he was about to steal for his journey.

On the old principle that one might just as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, he had selected Mr. Guggenbaum's Rolls rather than the Ford. In twenty minutes they had the big car out in the mews, unwrapped from its sacking and with its tyres pumped up. To Hemmingway's relief, he had discovered some spare tins of petrol and oil at the back of the garage, They filled the tanks, he got into the driver's seat and prepared to depart. Just as he was about to do so a last bright idea occurred to him.

'Can either of you chaps drive?' he asked.

'I can,' volunteered the younger constable. 'Why, sir?'

'Well, I can't lock the garage up again and it's a pity to leave the Ford there at a time like this when it might come in useful to somebody. It would probably be stolen if I did, anyhow; so I suggest that you drive it round to the nearest A.R.P. authorities and hand it over to them with Sir Samuel Curry's compliments.'

'That's a very good idea,' agreed the senior policeman, and, with a wave of his hand, Hemmingway drove away in the luxurious Guggenbaum Rolls.

His journey to the East End was uneventful. After he had passed through the City he found that there were more people about than in the West End. Most of the women and children had been evacuated, but quite a number of the male population, having no place in the country to go to, had had perforce to remain in London. A few food shops were open, but no other business was in progress, and here and there groups of men were standing talking on the street-corners.

According to plan, he drove all-out down the Commercial Road, with his hooter screaming, to prevent a possible holdup. Angry looks were cast at him here and there from the groups on the pavements as he whizzed by; and he was loudly booed by a crowd outside the Catholic Church. At the crossing by Limehouse Town Hall a policeman waved to him to halt, but he ignored the signal, swerved violently and raced on. As there was little traffic, and no children were playing in the gutters, he reached the 'Main Brace' without accident.

Pulling up, he saw half a dozen tough-looking men in caps and scarves standing outside on the pavement. They immediately began to eye the car with an interest that Hemmingway found disturbing. With the memory of the hold-up he had seen earlier that morning fresh in his mind, it seemed to him quite on the cards that, if he left the car to go into the pub and rouse Lavina, and if any of them were capable of driving, they might quite well steal it.

Looking up at the window of the room on the first floor in which Lavina was presumably still sleeping, he plied his klaxon for all he was worth in the hope of rousing her, but, as it was only 8.30 and she had been in bed under three hours, he felt certain that she must still be sunk in exhausted slumber.

Next door to the 'Main Brace' there was a small greengrocer's which still had a little stock for sale, and, propped up on the pavement, were some baskets of potatoes. Taking a half-crown out of his pocket, Hemmingway slipped out of the driver's seat, ran across the pavement, threw the half-crown towards an astonished-looking young Jewess who was seated inside the shop, and grabbed up two handfuls of the potatoes.

The men on the pavement had now stopped talking and were watching his unusual procedure with amazement. Before any of them had moved he was back beside the car. Raising his arm, he hurled one of the potatoes straight through Lavina's window.

The crash of glass roused the men into sudden activity. As the pieces fell tinkling on the pavement one little runt of a man stepped forward, crying: 'Oi! Wot's the gime?'

Hemmingway smiled disarmingly. 'The woman, the dog and the walnut tree, the more you beat 'em, the better they be,' he quoted cryptically.

'He's loopy!' said a brawny-looking fellow in a checked cap.

'No, I'm not,' Hemmingway grinned, 'but my girl's asleep up in that bedroom and I wanted to wake her. Nice little surprise for her. Treat 'em rough, and they think more of you.'

' 'E is loopy!' declared the man in the checked cap.

'Bin seein' too many films, that's wot it is,' remarked another. ' 'E thinks 'e's Errol Flynn or somethink.'

At that moment Lavina, blear-eyed and dishevelled, thrust her golden head out of the window. 'Oh, it's you!' she murmured, still half asleeep. 'What a shock you gave me!'

Hemmingway looked up. 'Never mind that. Get your clothes on and come down at once.'

The little man who had first spoken turned to leer at Hemmingway. 'Nice bit o' skirt you've got there, mister.'

'Oh, she's all right,' Hemmingway consented casually.

'Nice car, too,' the little man went on, with a wink at his friends.

'Yes. I wish it were mine.'

'Ain't it, then?'

'No, I've borrowed it.'

'Fancy now!' The tough looked round with a smirk. 'Queer, ain't it? Wot would you say if I told you me and my pals had been thinkin' of borrering it ourselves?'

'I should think it was your unlucky day,' said Hemmingway genially.

'Oh, you would, would yer?' The little man ducked suddenly and came charging at Hemmingway to butt him in the stomach.

But Hemmingway was ready for the attack. During the whole of the conversation he had been leaning against the car with his right hand behind him gripping the end of his loaded crop which lay on the driver's seat. He side-stepped neatly and, bringing the crop round, landed the little man a swift crack over his bullet head with it.

As the leader of the roughs went sprawling in the gutter his friends charged in. Hemmingway dodged round the back of the car. With loud shots three of his antagonists followed. The other two came round the front of the bonnet, so that he was caught between two fires.

The big man in the check cap was one of the two who had come round by the front. As he appeared to be the most formidable of the troop Hemmingway leapt straight at him, bashing the leaded head of the crop into his ugly face.

The man staggered, screamed and fell, but his companion caught Hemmingway off his balance with a blow on the side of the ear, which sent him reeling. Next second the three in his rear rushed at him and he had fallen fighting to the roadway with the whole pack on top of him.

He kneed one in the belly and struck another in the eye, causing him to shriek with pain. Then, with a desperate wriggle, he freed himself, staggered to his feet and dashed back to the pavement. But they were on him again before he had time to get his back to the wall. One of them kicked him in the stomach, another hit him in the mouth and he fell once more.

Meanwhile, the little man had picked himself up, climbed into the driver's seat of the Rolls and got the engine going.

'Come 011, boys!' he yelled. 'Finish 'im off an' jump in before the cops turn up!'

Those were the last words he lived to utter. There was a sharp report, his head jerked up, an ugly splodge of red appeared just below his temple; without a moan he sagged and collapsed in a silent heap.

The men who were on top of Hemmingway sprang up in panic. Gasping from the pain in his stomach he rolled over. Framed in the side-entrance of the public-house he glimpsed Lavina. Her face was white as a sheet, but his automatic was clenched firmly in her hand and a trail of blue smoke still drifted from its barrel.

The roughs were staring at her. It takes a brave man to stand his ground when threatened with a loaded automatic; particularly when the person behind it has already demonstrated that he is prepared to kill with it. When that person is a woman, to take such a risk is no longer bravery, but madness. Hemmingway's attackers turned and fled; the two remaining thugs picked themselves up out of the gutter and took to their heels with equal swiftness. In less than a minute after the shot had been fired Hemmingway was standing on the pavement alone, with Lavina.

'God!' he panted, looking again at the tumbled figure on the driver's seat of the car. 'You've killed him 1'

'I'm sorry,' said Lavina in a small voice. She seemed a little stunned but not particularly upset. 'You know, it all happened so suddenly. I'd only just got my dress on when I heard the shouting and when I looked out of the window I saw them all attacking you. I simply grabbed up the gun, rushed downstairs and shot him. Funny, wasn't it?'

The fact that she had killed a man did not strike Hemmingway as at all funny. The little rat was probably no better than he should have been but, all the same, he was a human being and if Lavina was caught all sorts of unpleasant complications might ensue. The thugs had stopped farther down the street and were shouting. The Jewish girl had rushed out of the greengrocer's shop. Other people were running up the street from both directions to see what had happened. The fat landlord appeared in the doorway of the pub and after one look at the dead man in the driver's seat of the Rolls, began to blow shrilly upon a police whistle.

Lavina still held the gun and Hemmingway yelled to her:

'Don't let him grab you but throw him his money for the bedroom!' Then, turning to the car, he opened its door and dragged the dead body out on to the pavement.

Lavina held out one of the pound-notes that Hemmingway had left with her, but the landlord stopped blowing on his whistle to exclaim: 'I wouldn't soil me 'ands with it.'

It was no time to argue. Hemmingway was now in the driver's seat. As he called to her, she slipped round to the far side of the car and jumped in beside him. He let in the clutch and the big Rolls slid forward.

The roughs and a lot of other people were now barring their passage a hundred yards along the street, but Hemmingway sent the car charging straight at them. One flung a stone which starred the window, but when they saw that he was prepared to run them down they leapt aside and scattered. A moment later their shouted curses were fading in the distance.

'By Jove! That was a nasty business,' Hemmingway muttered.

'Horrible!' she agreed. 'Of course, I didn't really mean to do

it.'

'You knew my gun was loaded.'

'Yes. But except for the other night at the Dorchester, I don't think I've ever seen men fighting in earnest before. In a way that I can't quite explain, I felt as though I was back on a film set and we were all putting on an act. I was quite surprised myself when I saw that I'd killed him. I wonder if you can understand that?'

'I think so,' Hemmingway said slowly. 'My hurling that potato through your window had only just woken you from a deep sleep. I suppose you must have felt that the whole thing was a sort of nightmare.'

'In a way I did. But if I'd been fully conscious I believe I'd have shot him just the same.'

'What?' Hemmingway turned to stare at her for a second.

She nodded, and went on with that inexorable feminine realism which takes no count of ethics: 'You see, it was us or them, wasn't it? You were on the ground and it looked to me as though they were going to murder you, but I was scared that I might shoot you if I fired in that direction. The little fellow had started up the car and, if he had got away with it, I knew we'd both have been sunk. It just came to me in a flash that if I shot him that would scare the others out of their wits; so I aimed at his head and pulled the trigger.'

Hemmingway was quite staggered by the logic of her simple and effective reasoning. He knew there must be a catch in it somewhere but he couldn't argue about it, and she was probably right in believing that she'd saved his life; or at least saved him from serious injury. His laugh was a little uncertain as he said:

'Well, it was darned good shooting, anyhow.'

'Oh, no,' she demurred modestly. 'I was only about six feet from him; the poor little wretch didn't stand a chance.'

Hemmingway had turned south, into the Blackwall Tunnel, and was now running through it under the Thames. He was thinking what a mighty good job it was that there had been no police about; otherwise Lavina would certainly have been arrested for manslaughter in the first degree—and they were by no means out of the wood yet.

Fortunately, as it affected their situation at the moment, no private calls had been taken by the London telephone exchanges for the last twenty-four hours so that neither the landlord nor one of his neighbours could ring up the police, but the matter was certain to be reported as soon as they arrived on the scene. A description of themselves and the car would be given, and Mr. Guggenbaum's luxurious Rolls would be a very easy car to trace. Hemmingway wished now that he had contented himself with the Ford.

The question was: would the police be too occupied with other matters to wireless their speed-cars on the south side of the river to keep a look out for the Rolls? They were certainly much too busy to bother about ordinary motoring offences, hut to shoot a man dead and leave his body on the pavement was a very different business. He did not mention to Lavina his gloomy speculations about possible trouble to come. Instead, he asked her how she was feeling.

'Pretty mouldy,' she shrugged, 'and I must look like the Wrath of God. 1 lost my bag days ago in the riot at the Dor-

Chester so there's not a trace of make-up left on my face and I didn't even have a chance to wash when you fetched me out of bed just now. D'you think we could pull up somewhere where I could buy a comb and some powder and a lipstick?'

'No,' replied Hemmingway, 'I don't. And it doesn't matter much what your face looks like, anyhow. It's how you're feeling in yourself that I'm worried about.'

'Then you don't know much about women, my friend,' Lavina said with some asperity. 'A girl feels good or ill to exactly the extent she sees her face looking in a mirror. I caught one glimpse of mine in that lousy bedroom and I feel like Methuselah's wife dug up out of her grave.'

'Well, you'll feel better when you get down to the country.'

They had left the Tunnel, crossed Greenwich Marshes and were passing the Naval College when Lavina suddenly exclaimed :

'I say, what's happened to Derek?'

'I haven't the faintest idea and I don't damned well care,' Hemmingway said bluntly. While they sped on through South Street, across the main Blackheath road and uphill towards Lewisham, he proceeded to tell her of the extreme inconvenience which Derek had caused him.

'You don't like Derek, do you?' she said quietly, giving him a quick look from beneath half-lowered eyelids.

'I've no objection to him as a person but I don't suffer fools gladly at any time and I just hate having them around when I have to handle an emergency.'

'Poor Derek,' she sighed. 'And he's so good-looking, don't you think?'

'I've never even looked at him from that point of view. All I know is that he landed you in this mess and has given me one hell of a job to get you out of it.'

'Why did you bother?'

'Because you're Sam's wife, of course.'

She smiled a little acidly. 'Thank you. That's quite the nicest compliment I've had for a long time.'

'Oh, come,' he shrugged impatiently. 'I didn't mean it that way, but Sam's been more than any father to me for the last seven years. I'd be selling pea-nuts in the streets of New York, or something of that kind, if it hadn't been for Sam. You're his wife, so it was just up to me to find you and get you down to Stapleton somehow.'

'With a neat label round my neck, I suppose: "In good order and untouched".'

'That's just the way I hope it'll be,' he agreed, refusing to rise to her baiting.

There was very little traffic about and few people; and Hemmingway was anxious to place a good distance between themselves and the East End as soon as possible; so, on entering the broad tree-lined streets of Rushey Green, he let the car rip. In Catford, as he slowed down to enter a narrower turning, sign-posted to the crystal palace, Lavina remarked thoughtfully:

'You're rather an extraordinary person, aren't you, Hemmingway?'

'No. I wouldn't say that,' he smiled. 'My mental attainments are a good bit better than most people's, if that's what you mean; but otherwise I've ordinary feelings and only one head and a couple of legs like everybody else.'

'I wasn't thinking of you mentally or physically, but as a person. It's so unusual to find anyone these days with such unquestioning loyalty.'

'I don't think so. Look at Sam. You couldn't find a more loyal man than Sam anywhere.'

'He's your hero, isn't he?'

'Yes. If you like to put it that way, I suppose he is.'

'And now you've saved his wife from worse than death!' she mocked him. 'It might have come to that, you know. I probably shouldn't have awakened till the evening, and if I'd still been on my own in the East End just after sunset the sight of me might have given lots of unpleasant people funny ideas.'

'Well, let's say that I was lucky enough to get you out of what might have proved a pretty sticky corner.'

'And I saved your life; or, at least, saved you from being beaten unconscious by those thugs.'

'You certainly did.'

'That's lovely. Then, we're all paladins together. But tell me, what sort of effect does the comet have on you?'

'It makes me feel very queer. I was in the house last night waiting for you and Roy and Derek to turn up and . . he hesitated.

'Go on,' she said.

'Well, if you ever get back to St. James's Square you may find out.'

'Don't be a pig! Do tell me?'

'All right. But you must remember that at the time I was completely abnormal. I'm afraid I used up all your scent.'

'My scent! I thought you smelt rather nice.'

'Oh, afterwards 1 naturally did my best to get the damned stuff off me but I suppose some of it's still lingering in my hair. Sorry to have robbed you, and how the idea came to me, God knows. But I just couldn't resist going up to your room, sitting down at your dressing-table and dabbing myself all over till the bottle gave out. Extraordinary, wasn't it?'

'Very,' agreed Lavina, smiling at her toes.

They had run up Perry Hill, entering a poorer district in Lower Sydenham. As they mounted the steeper gradient of West Hill, towards the Palace, they saw that a small crowd had collected about half-way up it where the road narrowed to cross a railway bridge above Sydenham Station.

Hemmingway put on speed again. He did not mean to be held up now that he had at last got away with both Lavina and the car and had every hope of being out in the open country in under half an hour; but a moment later his brows drew together in a frown and he checked the car.

As the group in the roadway parted he saw that they had stretched a number of thick wires across it, between two and six feet from the ground, and were flagging him to pull up.

For a moment he contemplated charging the barrier; but the wires were almost cable size and he knew that even the weight of the Rolls would not be great enough to snap them all. He would only succeed in forcing them back like bow strings and might even turn the car over.

'Lord, help us! It's the police,' was the thought that flashed into his mind. 'They must have telephoned through already and, knowing we'd killed one man, thought we'd take a chance on running others down if only we could get away. They've fixed these wires to make certain of halting us her-.'

But, as he brought the car to a standstill, he saw at once that there was not a single policeman in the crowd. It was another gang of roughs.

'Give me that thing,' he cried to Lavina, snatching the auto-_matic that lay on the seat between them as the ugly-looking mob surged round the car. Yet a second glance at the yelling crowd convinced him of the folly of either threatening them with it or attempting to use it. There were at least fifty men in the mob and their faces showed them to be desperate. He felt certain that if he even produced the gun Lavina and he would be dragged out of the car and kicked to death.

'Come on!' shouted a man in a red tie, who seemed to be the leader of the roughs. 'Out you get! We want that car!'

Hemmingway hesitated, but only for a second.

'Out you get!' repeated the man. 'And no argument, unless you want a beating-up!'

Discretion was unquestionably the better part of valour. For Lavina's sake as well as his own, Hemmingway saw that peaceable surrender was the only policy.

'It's no good,' he said, with a wry grin at her. 'We can't tackle this lot. We'll have to get out.' And, picking up his satchel of papers, he helped her down into the road.

The gang appeared to be organised and, having fixed up their car-catching apparatus, were taking their turns to get away in each private car they could waylay as it came along.

The man in the red tie gave an order. The barrier of wires was lowered. A flashy little Jew climbed into the driver's seat and drove the Rolls over it; after which about eight of the other men, laughing and joking, packed themselves into the car.

Taking Lavina by the arm, Hemmingway led her over to the pavement. As they had given up the car peacefully, nobody attempted to molest them; but with bitterness in their hearts they watched the wire barrier raised again and Mr. Guggen-baum's beautiful Rolls drive smoothly away.

Crazy Day

'Damn!' said Lavina forcibly. 'What the hell do we do now?'

'We can either stay here, join the crowd and try and muscle into one of the cars they pull up, or start walking out of London.' Hemmingway's voice was quite dispassionate.

'We might wait here till doomsday,' she sniffed. 'It's really a sort of general post that's going on. They're simply turning one lot of people out of a car so that another lot can get away.'

'Sure. But there were only two of us in the Rolls and about ten of them packed into it before it drove off. If they manage to hold up a lorry or two, we might quite well get places. I'm game to walk myself but I'm afraid you'd just hate it, so in this case I'm leaving the choice to you.'

The question was unexpectedly settled for them. Three vans came streaking up the road from the direction of Forest Hill-They pulled up just in front of the barrier and a score of policemen tumbled out. Evidently one of the local police had seen what was going on and had succeeded in getting assistance.

Some of the roughs in the crowd began to hurl bricks and bottles. Hemmingway grabbed Lavina's arm and dragged her back into the shelter of the Station doorway. Striking out right and left with their batons the police drove the mob back. In two minutes it was all over: the organisers of the hold-up broke and scattered.

A few men whom the police had collared were bundled into one of the vans; they removed the wire barricade, coiled it up and put it in another; then they drove off again.

'What filthy luck that they didn't come on the scene ten minutes earlier!' Hemmingway muttered. 'Anyway, we've no option now; we'll have to walk.'

'Hell!' Lavina glanced at her feet. 'Anyway, thank goodness

I had day shoes on when I left St. James's Square. Let's go then.'

They set off up the hill past the two towers of the Crystal Palace on its summit and entered Church Street, Upper Norwood, where the road sloped down again. Rather to her surprise, after they had been going for about half an hour Lavina felt better. Although she had only spent three out of the last forty-eight hours in bed, she had been sitting or lying about in the grounds of Buckingham Palace for more than half that time and, whenever her brain had been too tired to wonder any more about what was going to happen to her she had dozed quite a lot; so that her exhaustion when Hemmingway had found her had been much more mental than physical, and the walking was doing her good.

The day was overcast so they could see neither the sun nor the comet, which had now approached sufficiently near the earth to have been visible, even in daylight, if the clouds had not intervened. But the day was warm, dry and windless, so walking was pleasant enough even on the pavements of the suburbs through which they passed, now that there were no shopping crowds to impede their progress.

Although it took them a little to the east of the shortest cross-country course to Dorking, Hemmingway had decided to bypass Croydon from fear of becoming involved with other lawless mobs in that densely populated area and the few people they met were hurrying along on their own concerns. Cars and vans, all on their way south, passed from time to time, but their drivers ignored Hemmingway's signals, so eventually he realised that it would be hopeless to try and cadge a lift until they were farther out of London. As they walked on Lavina gave him her version of the affair at the Dorchester and details of her internment. Then he retailed to her an account °f Derek's adventures and ended with his own exploit in getting away with the stolen car.

She laughed a lot at the way he had fooled the police into helping him to prepare the Rolls and, as Hemmingway's one 'dea was to keep her mind occupied so that she should not tire too quickly, he began to tell her some amusing episodes of the days when he had been struggling for a living in New York.

The vague antagonism that had arisen between them before the hold-up had now entirely disappeared and for the first time they were really discovering each other as individuals. Each found the other had more in them than they had previously supposed. Lavina displayed a practical streak in her views on people and affairs with which Hemmingway would not have credited her; and from having considered him as an almost monkishly seriously minded man she revised her opinion and decided that he was really a very cheerful and amusing person.

It was 8.30 when they had careered away from the 'Main Brace' in the Rolls and by 11 o'clock they were passing through Shirley. Neither of them had yet breakfasted and they both discovered suddenly that they were extremely hungry; so they began to look about for a place where they could get something to eat.

Here in the more distant suburbs there were more people about, as such districts had not been evacuated and comparatively few of their inhabitants had gone off on their own to the country. Most of them were either attending services at the churches or remaining in their own homes, killing time to the best of their ability until they could learn their fate.

In the shopping centres there were ration queues here and there in front of the food dealers who were now being supplied by the Government organisation that had been set up; but most of the other shops were closed, no buses were running and there were very few cars about.

Inquiries of people in the queues soon informed Hemmingway that he would not be able to get meat, fish, bread, butter or milk without having a ration card; but, although the grocers' stores had been sadly depleted in the last few days, they still had a certain amount of stock. At one Hemmingway managed to buy a tin of oxtail soup; at another some biscuits and potted shrimps; and at a third a tin of cherries.

To Lavina's joy they also found a chemist's shop that was open so she was able to get a comb, mirror, face cream, lipstick and powder; while Hemmingway added aspirins, a bottle of Evian, a bottle of lime-juice and two collapsible drinking cup^s to their store. Just as they were leaving she joked about his confession to having used up all her scent the night before, so he promptly bought her the most expensive bottle in the shop-

Having no tin-opener and being unable to buy one, Hem^-mingway had got the chemist to open the tins for them and, _as it would have been awkward for them to carry the open tins far, they turned into the first field that they came to on their _way to Selsdon.

It was quite a small field—just a plot that had never been built on—between two fair-sized houses with long gardens. Crawling through a hole in its broken fence, they sank down gratefully in the long grass and began their picnic.

They had to eat out of tins and spread the shrimps on the biscuits with their fingers but after their long night out and the exertions of the morning the food tasted heavenly, and they both agreed that it was the best meal they had had for years.

'I think we're entitled to a bit of a rest now,' Hemmingway said when they had done.

'My dear,' she smiled, 'I don't think you'll ever get me on my feet again, anyway. I haven't walked so far for ages.'

'You'll have to walk much farther yet, unless we can get a lift from somebody. We've only covered about five miles so far and, if 1 possibly can, I mean to get you down to Stapleton tonight.'

'How far is it?'

Hemmingway got out his map and studied the country. 'About fifteen miles as the crow flies; that means at least twenty by the highways.'

'Twenty miles?' gasped Lavina.

'Sounds tough but it's not too bad, really. It's just past midday and if he started now an athlete could get down there by 'eatime. Even walking without effort one can cover three miles at hour so, for us, it would be about a seven hour trudge. Say ^We give ourselves two hours' rest and start at two o'clock, if ^we could keep going all the time we'd be there by nine. Let's allow fifteen minutes in every hour for a breather and we should still be able to make it at the latest by eleven. Think y°u can do it?'

Lavina yawned. 'I don't know, but I'll try.'

'You're a good guy when one gets to know you,' he smiled appreciatively. 'Say we don't reckon to get in till eleven, we'll have to average just over two miles an hour. You ought ⁰ be able to do that if you can only keep the old feet going °^ne in front of the other.'

'You're a good guy too—once one gets to know you—and I'm getting to know you fast,' she laughed in reply. 'I expect I'll manage it somehow. But how about our waking up at two o'clock? If I sleep now I shall probably lie here like a log tin midnight.'

'Don't worry, I'm pretty good at that sort of thing; trained myself when I was a kid and I've found it mighty useful ever since to be able to drop off anywhere and wake again at will. As I've been up all night it's a bit of a risk but I'm going to chance it. A couple of hours' sleep now will set me up again for quite a time but if I don't have it I'll be too beat to get you over the last lap this evening.' They lay down among the long grass and wild flowers and were conscious only for a moment of their perfume in the heat before dropping off to sleep.

When Hemmingway woke it was a quarter past two and he felt that his gift had not let him down too badly. He roused Lavina and, after she had tidied her hair and attended to her face, they set off along the road towards Selsdon. It was pleasant walking at a leisurely pace through Addiscombe Woods and they took their first rest on the top of the hill there.

It was then that they first noticed something queer about the sky. The clouds, which were of the pale-grey summery variety, had taken on a faintly pink tinge. Neither of them commented on it but both wondered with vague alarm if the comet, now being so much nearer, was about to produce its strange effect in spite of the fact that there were many hours yet to go before sundown. Everything was very still; not a leaf rustled in the windless air and it was so hot that most of the people they saw were walking in their shirtsleeves with their coats over their arms. Hemmingway followed their example and began to curse the weight of the satchel of papers he was still carrying.

With the slowly-reddening sky in mind they kept a close watch on themselves as they went on their way through Sander-stead, but experienced nothing unusual except a spontaneous gaiety that caused them to laugh a lot even at the most stupid things. At last they reached the main Brighton road and turning left along it through Purley tried once more to get a by hailing each of the few south-bound vehicles that passed them but, failing, they left it by a right-hand fork about a mil⁶ south of the town and, walking along some roads lined with substantial houses, at last reached more or less open country.

Hemmingway was much happier now that they had got clear of London. A thin trickle of refugees was still moving along all the roads that led out of the capital but if they could avoid populous places there seemed little risk now that they would run into mobs from which they might suffer violence. At their fourth halt Hemmingway reckoned they were more than half-way, having walked another eight miles, making thirteen in all since the morning; but Lavina was going well and he had a reasonably good hope that they would manage the remaining twelve miles which they still had to cover before nightfall.

As they went on again the pinkish-red of the sky gradually grew deeper and the atmosphere more sultry. Suddenly, without in the least intending to do so, Lavina began to sing. Hemmingway joined in and for a mile or more they marched along singing all the choruses they could think of together. Only the fact that their throats became parched through the stifling heat put an end to their impromptu concert and caused Lavina to suggest that they should try to get a cup of tea somewhere.

They were now going through narrow, twisting, hilly lanes; real country that might have been a hundred miles from London. There was not a soul about and even the scattered houses were hidden from them by high hedges. At a break in one they saw a garden gate and turned in through it; but a large dog rushed at them barking furiously. Hemmingway was only Just in time to push Lavina out of the gate and slam it behind ^fhem; then the angry beast, its jaws slavering, scraped upon the woodwork with its claws in a frantic endeavour to get over it and attack them.

They had no means of knowing if it was just an ill-tempered brute kept by its owner to drive off tramps or if the red glow from the skies had turned its brain; but the dog showed all the signs of madness so it was certainly not worth risking its attacking them by trying to get up to the house.

At the next house they were more fortunate. It was hardly '^arger than a cottage but had a garden gay with flowers and in front of the porch they observed an old gentleman skipping. Approaching, they asked if they might buy a cup of tea from him. He panted out that they were very welcome to one and could make it for themselves but that he must not pause until he had done another hundred skips.

Leaving their strange host they went into his kitchen, made tea and carried him out a cup; but he only shook his head, so they retired to drink their own in his comfortable sitting, room. While they were there the floor suddenly seemed to move slightly beneath them and the tea rocked in the cups. It was an earth tremor and Lavina looked at Hemmingway apprehensively; but it was over in a moment and gave them no further cause for alarm.

On going outside they found their host red-faced, pop-eyed and gasping, but still skipping; and no argument which Hemmingway could produce would induce him to stop, except for a few moments from time to time to regain his breath. So, although they feared that he would have a heart attack if he kept it up till sunset, they had to leave him there still labouring in the grip of his strange mania.

Both of them were tired now but somehow it no longer seemed quite such an urgent matter that they should reach Stapleton that night. The reddish glow pervaded everything, changing the colours of the landscape so that it seemed strange and unreal. They felt as though, instead of tea, they had been drinking absinth and were slightly drunk upon it; their perceptions were hypersensitive, sharpened to every sound and feeling; yet they were filled with a delicious lassitude.

As they strolled side by side down a steep, hedge enclosed lane, Hemmingway suddenly realised with a little shock that he was holding Lavina's hand. He did not let go, however, because he felt that that might draw attention to the fact that he had been holding it; and it was a very nice firm little hand with long, graceful fingers, as he had previously noticed. They were heading for Tadworth but Hemmingway had not consulted his map for some time and evidently they had taken the wrong turning somewhere as, on entering a village, which sprawled along a wider road, they found that it was called Burgh Heath.

Roused now from his pleasant lethargy Hemmingway sa^ that it was nearly eight o'clock and his map showed him that although they had covered fourteen miles since lunch tii»^e' having gone out of their way, they still had another eight to do. That meant that, even if they did the last lap of the journey without resting at all, they could not hope to get in before eleven; but if they didn't rest it was certain that Lavina would crack up, so it looked now as though they would not reach their destination before midnight.

As it was, when he suggested that they ought to try and make up time by increasing their pace she insisted that they must find somewhere in the village where she could sit down for a little, and pointed to a cake shop, some distance down the broad street which appeared to be open. When they reached the shop they found that it had been broken into and the dozen or so people who were in it were mostly refugees like themselves who were snatching a free meal from such food as remained there.

The behaviour of the people in the shop was, to say the least of it, peculiar. One man was gobbling down stale buns as though he was trying to win a bet. Another had apparently raided the till and was counting the money in it over and over again. On the floor in one corner a couple were lying sound asleep in a most affectionate embrace; and, strangest of all, a cadaverous-looking man, dressed in women's clothes but with his trouser-ends projecting beneath a short skirt, was preening himself before a mirror. These antics did not strike Lavina and Hemmingway with quite so much surprise as they would have done normally and their only reaction was to laugh uproariously.

Hungry again after their long tramp since luncheon, they seized on a Madeira cake, hacked it in pieces and began to eat it almost ravenously. Between mouthfuls they exchanged remarks with some of the other people, which mainly concerned the distance each of them had tramped that day, where they ^were making for, whether the comet would kill them all, and ^wild rumours about an impossible invention with which the scientists intended to attempt blowing the comet up before it Sot much nearer.