Sixty Days to Live

They had just finished the Madeira cake when a nice-looking Voung man entered the door. No sooner did his eye light upon Lavina than he rushed at her, seized her in his arms and began ^to kiss her violently.

G

Hemmingway grabbed him by the neck and hauled him off; upon which he turned and struck out like a maniac. He was a well-built, powerful fellow and obviously dangerous, so Hemmingway, who was doing all he could to protect himself from a spate of blows, was compelled to snatch up his loaded crop and knock his attacker over the head with it.

Instantly the whole place was in confusion. The young man now lay spreadeagled, unconscious, on the floor and some of the people began to shout that Hemmingway had murdered him, while others declared that he had been perfectly right to protect his girl-friend; upon which they all joined issue with fists, chairs, cups, saucers, cakes and anything else that came handy.

Hemmingway managed to push Lavina behind the counter and, filled with a fighting spirit which suddenly seemed to have got hold of him, lashed out right and left with his crop. But the riot was brought to a sudden and unexpected conclusion.

Without the least warning a 'quake shook the floor beneath their feet. They staggered, lost their balance and righted themselves. But the tremor came again. The woodwork of the counter creaked, some lumps of plaster dropped from the ceiling and the whole building trembled.

At the first shock the fighting had ceased. White-faced and scared the whole party rushed out into the street, Hemmingway and Lavina among them. Gripped by panic, the little crowd scattered, shouting with terror as they ran. The shocks continued; a chimney-pot leaned crazily, hovered a second, and fell; glass was tinkling down from some of the windows; the inhabitants of the village were tumbling helter-skelter out of their doorways. Grabbing Lavina by the wrist Hemmingway dragged her along after him towards the outskirts of the village, but they had not covered a hundred yards when she screamed and fell.

He pulled up with a jerk and lifted her from the gutter. She was not badly hurt, only having bruised her knees, but the heel of her shoe had caught in a grating, causing her to trip, and in her fall she had wrenched it right off.

The tremors eased as she sat on the roadside lamenting her ruined stockings but, actually, the tearing off of the heel was a far more serious matter as they had no means of nailing it on again and there was still an eight-mile walk before them. The only thing to do was to look for a shoe shop or the village cobbler.

With Lavina hobbling beside him Hemmingway turned back along the village street. It had been emptied as though by magic of the panic-stricken crowd and the people who had rushed out of their houses, but the village did not appear to boast a shoe shop and it was some time before Hemmingway could find anyone to ask where the cobbler lived.

In the churchyard a black-clad man was digging as though his life depended on it. He had already turned up three mould-covered coffins and was furiously shovelling away the earth from round a fourth. At Hemmingway's question the man turned towards them a haggard face down which the sweat was pouring in rivulets, shook his head angrily, and returned to his gruesome task.

A hundred yards farther on a skinny, middle-aged woman who was seated on a grassy bank busily plaiting a daisy chain, directed them; and they found the cobbler's cottage just outside Burgh Heath on the Epsom Road. As they turned in at its gate a fat, freckle-faced woman came rushing out of it.

'Go away! Go away!' she shouted excitedly, waving them off with her hands.

'What's the matter?' Hemmingway asked.

'My 'usband,' panted the woman, ' 'e's got a screw loose, poor dear. 'E's orl right with us but 'e's started shootin' at strangers. It's this filthy sky that's done it.' She pointed upwards at the heavens which were now a deep reddish-orange and added pathetically: 'It's got us all one way or another. Round five o'clock I started pickin' the flowers in the garden and I just can't stop.'

They noticed then that although she had a well-filled herbaceous border there was hardly a flower in it. Lupins, delphiniums, Canterbury bells, sweet-william, stock—all were gone ~~and, suddenly kneeling down, she began to pluck a few pinks that had escaped her previous forays.

At that moment a wiry, red-haired little man popped out of the cottage. Waving an old sporting gun he cried wildly:

'Enemy spies! Enemy spies! They can't deceive me. I know them,' and he proceeded to level his fowling piece at the in-truders.

Hemmingway thrust Lavina before him through the gate and pulled her down under a bank at the roadside just as the gun went off with a loud bang.

The shot rattled through the hedge above them. Fearing that the mad cobbler might give chase before he blazed off with his other barrel, they jumped up and ran a couple of hundred yards to put a bend of the road between the cottage and themselves.

'Phew!' Lavina exclaimed, coming to a halt. 'That was a nasty one!' But suddenly they began to laugh uproariously and for minutes on end they stood there rocking with mirth, absolutely unable to control themselves.

Their laughter ceased only from lack of breath, and when they had at last recovered Hemmingway said:

'I can't think why we're laughing; it's no joke really because you can't possibly walk another eight or nine miles with the heel off one of your shoes.'

'I don't think I could anyhow.' Suddenly she leant against him.'Oh, God! I'm tired.'

'I know, darling—I know.' He used the endearment quite unconsciously and she did not seem to notice it. 'But we've got to try and make Stapleton somehow. Come on, we'll go slowly.'

With her arm through his and their hands clasped again, they set off back through Burgh Heath to the main Reigate road. They were now moving south, about half-way between those two great southern traffic arteries, the Brighton and the Portsmouth roads, and the country had remained unspoilt except for an occasional row of modern dwellings.

When they passed through Burgh Heath again it was just on nine o'clock and they still had another eight miles to go. Both of them were incredibly foot-sore and weary, yet both were still buoyed up by the extraordinary mental exhilaration which came from the red glow in the sky and it was without any horror, but rather with an excited interest, that they came upon the body of a dead man at the forked roads half a mile south of the village.

He was lying on his back on the grass at the side of the road _and his battered head showed that he had been attacked and murdered. His clothes were good but flashy and he was wearing a pair of lemon-coloured shoes.

As Hemmingway's eye fell upon the body he suddenly had _an idea. The shoes would be much too big for Lavina but wearing them, stuffed with grass, might be more comfortable for her than hobbling along with one heel-less shoe.

Kneeling down, he took the dead man's shoes off and told her his idea. The shoes were so big round the instep that even stuffed with grass they were by no means comfortable; yet they certainly made an improvement as she was at least able to take even steps again.

A weird, uncanny light lit the scene and, glancing down, he caught his breath at the exquisite contours of her face, the splendid but easy poise of her head upon her shoulders, her supple, beautifully-modelled limbs. A frightful craving seized him to take her in his arms and press her to him; to hold her next to his beating heart so that he might protect her with his body and his life blood. She was not looking at him and he brushed a hand across his eyes, knowing that he, too, was going mad from that eerie red radiance that was all about them. Next moment they entered the shelter of a tree-lined stretch of road and his sanity returned to him.

It was just before they reached Tadworth that they noticed a new change in the heavens. Before them to the south the clouds had broken, revealing patches of livid sky. By the time they had passed the crossroads south of Tadworth, leading on the right to Walton-on-the-Hill and on the left to Kingswood, nearly half the sky was clear. But as they mounted the hill a little farther on Lavina's strength began to fail her. She staggered on for a little along the open road across a desolate heath sprinkled with clumps of gorse and silver birch; then suddenly she turned, clutched at Hemmingway and burst into tears.

'f can't go on—I can't,' she wept. 'I can't go another step.'

They had walked over twenty-one miles that day; a splendid effort at any time for people unused to walking. Coming °n top of the strain they had previously undergone it had been too much; they were both now at the end of their tether. Dur-■ng the previous night Hemmingway must have walked an additional ten miles while he was searching for Lavina so he was almost as exhausted as she was; yet they now had only five miles to go to be safe among their friends and he stiil hoped that with frequent rests they might get in, even if they only covered a little over a mile an hour and reached their destination about two o'clock in the morning.

Among the heather beside the road there was a pile of last year's bracken. Picking up the sobbing Lavina in his arms, he scrambled with her over the ditch and, laying her down on the heap of dried fern, collapsed beside her.

After a few minutes she stopped crying and asked in a small voice:

'Must we go on? Can't we possibly stay here tonight?'

He sighed. 'I wish we could, but Sam will have been half out of his wits about you. We're on the last lap now and we'll rest a lot, but I think we must do our damnedest to make it.'

It was just as he had finished speaking that the full glory of the setting sun and its strange, malevolent neighbour burst upon them.

The reddish clouds had drifted northwards and the whole world was suffused with radiant light. The comet now looked as big as the moon and its red rays, mingling with the yellow ones of the sun, lit the whole landscape with a strange, unearthly glory, changing the colours of the trees and moorland so that they looked like the work of some mad artist.

Both of them felt a sudden renaissance of their strength. Their tiredness was forgotten. Their veins were filled with fire instead of blood.

They turned on the bracken and stared at each other hungrily. Hemmingway stretched out a hand and grasped Lavina's shoulder. Her voice came huskily:

'I'm sorry about Sam, but he's old and I'm young. I love you darling, and I've never really loved a man before.'

As he took her in his arms she was still choking: 'I love you —oh, I love you.'

The Last Dawn

Hemmingway lay on his back among the bracken, Lavina's golden head pillowed on his chest; clasped in a tight embrace they both slept the sleep of utter exhaustion, but they were not destined to sleep out the night.

Shortly after three in the morning a violent tremor shook the earth, the pile of bracken wobbled, the leaves of the trees rustled loudly, and there was a dull explosion somewhere ir. the distance. Instantly they both started up wide awake.

Two more tremors followed in quick succession, making them feel sick and giddy, then the earth was still again.

Lavina sat up and stared down at Hemmingway. He was lying on his side propped on one elbow, gazing up at her. Each could glimpse the outline of the other but the starlight was too dim for them to see each other's features.

Suddenly Lavina brought her hand up to her mouth to smother a little cry.

'What is it?' he asked. But he knew already. She was thinking of the way they had awakened in each other's arms and of those mad moments between the time when the full glare of the comet had beaten down upon them and the final fading °f its after-glow as they had drifted off to sleep. That had been ^a glorious hour. Their tiredness forgotten, they had been like drug addicts, hypersensitive to every touch and sound and Perfume; translated for a little time to the status of a pagan god and goddess in the Elysian fields, the past had ceased to have a meaning and the future was without significance.

Now they were sober and sane again, back in the cold predawn world of inhibitions and commitments; conscious of shame and guilt; harrowed by remorse and horror of their Weakness.

'Oh, I hate you!' cried Lavina suddenly.

'Do you?' Hemmingway's voice was bitter. 'I doubt if y_0lJ bate me as much as I hate you.'

'How could you do what you did!' she went on quickly, 'After all your talk about your devotion to Sam. You're a fine friend, aren't you! Pretending to take charge of his wife and then making love to her at the first opportunity.'

'It wasn't that way—and you know it!' Hemmingway contradicted her angrily. 'You're a born man-snatcher. It's in your blood. The very first time you set eyes on me you made up your mind to get me, didn't you? Then, at your wedding—yes, even on your wedding day—you tried to make me kiss you. Last night was your big opportunity, and you took it.'

'That's a lie,' Lavina flared. Her own misery had made her want to hurt him and the fact that she now realised that there was just a vague sub-stratum of truth in his accusations about their early meetings made her want to hurt him even more.

'I was in your care, exhausted, utterly done in, terribly wrought up about poor Roy's death and all this frightful business. In such a state any woman would be easy money. But a man's different. Men don't suffer from hysteria or become so overwrought that they don't know what they're doing. No decent man would take advantage of a woman on the verge of lunacy. He'd know she didn't mean a thing she said or did and have the strength of mind to control himself. Instead of thinking for us both, you just let yourself go without the least hesitation. Oh God, how I loathe you!'

'I loathe myself,' Hemmingway murmured bitterly. 'But that doesn't let you out. It's no good pretending you're a precious little innocent—sweet seventeen, never been kissed and all that. We were both under the influence of the comet, of course, but the fact that you were tired out isn't any excuse. I had a much more tiring night than you did before we started to walk out of London; and as a grown woman you were just as capable of resisting your feelings as I was.'

After a moment he went on more calmly. 'As I see it, the effect of the comet is simply to release people's inhibitions and destroy all their sense of values. If they're murderers at heart, they go out and kill someone; if they're quarrelsome, they quarrel; if they've a yen to make daisy-chains or skip, tbey just go to it; if they have a subconscious desire to make love to somebody, out it pops. Call it propinquity in our case, jf you like. If you'd been here with Derek, for example, or I'd been with some other girl, the same thing would probably have happened. Don't flatter yourself that I'm in love with you, because I'm not; and I don't imagine for one moment that you're the least bit more interested in me than you would be in any other healthy young man who happened along. But last night we just felt that way about each other and the responsibility is entirely mutual. That's all there is to it.'

'How flattering!' she sneered. 'To be dismissed like any trollop you might have picked up for the evening. I never thought any man would do that to me.'

'Then it's extremely good for your vanity.'

'You swine!'

'I see. I'm a swine now, because I'm not begging for some more of your remarkably good brand of kisses, am I? You'd like to continue the affair, it seems.'

'I'd like to beat your face in with a hunting crop. Above all, I'd like a bath to try and wash the very touch of you away from me. I feel like a leper at the moment.

'Don't worry! I wouldn't touch you again if you paid me; but since, apparently, you're not prepared to try and forget the whole thing, what's the alternative? D'you want to tell Sam about it when we reach Stapleton?'

'Good God, no!' Lavina's voice suddenly changed to a note of anxiety. 'You won't, will you?'

'Of course not. I've nothing but contempt for people who kiss and tell. What good does it ever do except make some other Person miserable?'

'Yes. I've always felt that, too.'

'All right, then, let's declare an armistice. What's done's done, and there's no sense in continuing a slanging match. I m prepared to take your word for it that you didn't really mean to tempt me, if you'll take mine that the comet absolutely overcame all the decent instincts I've ever had and the Principles of a lifetime. Naturally, we're hating each other at the moment, because we're normal again and we've both got certain standards which the other caused temporarily to be thrown down the drain; but we've got to try our damnedest to get back to the natural friendly footing we were on yester. day round about midday.'

She nodded slowly. 'Yes, you're quite right. It won't be easy, and how I'll be able to look Sam in the face I can't think. But I'm sure now that you couldn't help what happened. I've said awful things to you and I'm sorry.'

'I don't know how I'll face Sam again either. But I'm equally sorry about all the nasty things I said to you. I'm sure you know I didn't really mean them.' For the first time that morning he smiled, and he held out his hand.

She took it and with a firm hand-clasp they made their peace.

'How are you feeling?' he asked after a moment.

'Pretty mouldy. How about you?'

'Hardly at the top of my form. Still, I think we ought to get a move on.'

She stretched her arms and yawned. 'Wouldn't it be better to get another hour or two's sleep and set out in the dawn?'

'No. We'll be safe while darkness lasts.'

'Safe?' she echoed.

'Yes. But that's just as long as we will be,' he answered grimly. 'This accursed comet's so close to us now that even when the sky's cloudy its rays come through. You saw that for yourself from about four o'clock yesterday afternoon, and today it's certain to be much stronger. If we don't reach Stapleton by the time the sun gets up we'll be liable to go off the deep end again, just as we did last night.'

'I see. Then we'd better start at once.'

He laughed.

'I didn't mean to be rude or anything,' she added quickly, 'But we mustn't let that sort of thing happen again.'

'Well, we've only got about five miles to cover so we ought to be able to make it,' he said standing up.

They had nothing to pack so they set off at once, side by side, down the steep hill towards Pebble Combe.

When they reached the village, about half an hour later, Hemmingway happened to glance towards a villa standing quite close to the road. In the faint light he saw that there was a shed beside it and that the door of the shed was ajar. Touching Lavina's arm, he said:

'Wait here a moment,' and turned in up the garden path.

pjjs luck was in. As he had half-hoped that there might be there was a bicycle in the shed. Quite unperturbed by the thought that he was stealing, he wheeled it out and back to the roadway. If he had been called upon to justify his act he would have defended it on the grounds that it was essential for Lavina and himself to get to Stapleton before sunrise and that, barring accidents, the bicycle would ensure their being able to do so.

Having adjusted the saddle he got on to it and Lavina

mounted the step.

Everything went well until just after they had crossed the main Dorking-Reigate Road. When they were on the outskirts of Betchworth another earth-tremor ran across the night-shrouded land.

The bicycle wobbled violently. Although Hemmingway applied the brakes he could not control it as it swerved to the side of the road and they both fell off, landing in a ditch.

Having picked themselves up they sat there for a few moments, while fainter tremors continued to agitate the earth.

'With this sort of thing going on here,' Hemmingway said, 'God knows what must be happening in the volcanic zones—-places like the West Indies and Peru.'

'Thank goodness we're out in the open anyhow,' Lavina sighed. 'At least we won't be killed by bricks falling on our heads, or be buried alive under a building.'

When the tremors had ceased they mounted the bicycle again; but they proceeded very cautiously as here and there they came upon cracks in the tarmac of the road's surface, some of them as much as two or three inches wide, which made the going difficult.

In Betchworth a number of people were endeavouring to cope with the effects of the recent 'quake. A water main had burst at one end of the street and was flooding the roadway, ^while a little farther on there was a strong smell of escaping gas and they knew that at any moment there might be a nasty ^plosion. Just outside the village they saw that a jerry-built cottage had subsided and some men were dragging the victims from its ruins; but there was a faint greyness now in the eastern sky so, knowing that dawn was close at hand, Hemmingway Pressed on.

Another two miles and in the greyish light the gates of Stapleton Court at last came into sight before them. They ran along the moss-grown drive and past the lake up to the old Georgian mansion. As they dismounted before the front doot Hemmingway glanced at his watch and saw that they had done the last stage of their journey in just an hour.

The house was in darkness; its inmates apparently sleeping or else, perhaps, already on board the Ark. Lavina was just moving towards the front door when Hemmingway touched her arm.

'One second. I hadn't thought about it before but d'you mean to tell your uncle how Roy died?'

She hesitated. 'Perhaps it would be kinder not to.'

'Sure,' Hemmingway nodded. 'Let him think Roy got separated from you with Derek and that they may both turn up here at the last moment.'

'Derek . . .' she drew in her breath quickly. 'For the moment I'd forgotten that you'd left him behind.'

'On the contrary,' Hemmingway's voice was sharp. 'It was he who stole my car and left us in the lurch. He may be here already, in which case he's probably told your uncle about Roy. But if he hasn't made it, and does so during the day, one of us can tip him off not to say anything.'

'But you wouldn't have known about me if Derek hadn't escaped. And if Roy had still been alive the two of them would have been imprisoned and escaped together. How can we get over that?'

'We'll just say Derek said he lost Roy in the excitement and didn't know what had happened to him after he'd escaped himself. It's better for your uncle to imagine that Roy is still alive and has an equal chance with everybody else when the balloon goes up tonight, than to know that he's dead already, don't you think?'

'Yes. I hate having to lie about anything, but poor Uncle Oliver would be terribly cut up if he knew the truth.'

They were looking at each other, not at the house door, so they did not see it open a crack as Hemmingway said:

'Well, this is just one of those cases where we've got to do a bit of lying for the sake of sparing somebody else's feelings.'

Out of the corner of her eye Lavina glimpsed a faint line of light coming from the slightly open doorway. Turning at once she ran to it and cried:

'Hullo, there! It's us. We're here at last.'

The moment she moved, the door was swung wide open and Margery stood outlined in the dim light of a solitary candle which she had left on a table farther down the hall.

'So it's you!' she exclaimed. 'I heard voices so I came to see.'

'Oh, Margery!' With unaccustomed abandon Lavina flung herself into her sister's arms. 'I am so glad to see you. We've had a simply frightful time.'

'There, there!' Margery patted her back and kissed her affectionately. In spite of her jealousy she was really very fond of Lavina. 'We've been most terribly anxious about you—all of us—and we had to lock Sam up to prevent his going back to London to look for you yesterday.'

'Then, he got here safely! Thank God for that!' Lavina breathed, and, turning, she added: 'You know Hemmingway, don't you?'

Hemmingway stepped forward into the candlelight. 'Margery entertained me quite a number of times down here while you were on your honeymoon.'

It was as though the word honeymoon had rung a bell in Margery's brain. Hemmingway sensed a sudden hostility in the tensing of Margery's figure and as her eyes switched for a second to Lavina's face he felt sure that she had heard those last words of his outside the front door about lying for the sake of sparing people's feelings, and was putting a wrong interpretation on them. He tried to persuade himself that it might only be his own guilty conscience that had suggested it. but he could have sworn that Margery had guessed there had been something between him and Lavina. In a second, however, she recovered herself, smiled at him and said:

'Of course. Hemmingway was best man at your wedding. He' s an old friend of the family now; but where are Roy and Derek?'

'We're a bit worried about them,' Hemmingway confessed. It's rather a long story so perhaps we'd better keep it until the others can hear it as well, but we're hoping they'll get 3own here some time today. By-the-by, where are the others?'

'Getting up, I hope. I called them half an hour ago.'

'Why this early rising, darling?' Lavina asked. 'It's not half, past four yet.'

'It's on account of the comet,' Margery explained. 'You know that beastly red light it gives out that affects everybody so strangely? Oliver says that, even if it's cloudy today, the light will come through quite strongly almost directly after sunrise and get worse as the day goes on. Sunrise is at 4.43, and the comet will be over the horizon twelve minutes later; so it was decided that we ought all to be in the Ark before five o'clock.'

'Won't it affect anyone in the Ark, then?' Hemmingway inquired.

'It would in the ordinary way, but for the last few evenings Oliver has been experimenting with micas of various colours and he's found one which will neutralise the rays. Yesterday afternoon he and Daddy covered the port-holes of the Ark with it and they think we won't be affected if we sit in there all day.'

'I must go up and see them,' cried Lavina. 'Where's Sam?'

'He's in the nursery. They lured him in there by a trick and locked him up when he wanted to go back to London to try and find you.'

'What, they locked him up with Finkie?' Hemmingway laughed. 'Poor old Sam! You might at least have put them in

separate cells.'

'Oh, but Mr. Fink-Drummond went days ago,' Margery said quickly. 'Didn't Roy tell you?'

'He said nothing about it when he arrived at St. James's Square.'

'Well, it was the evening before he left.' Margery looked a little uncomfortable. 'You know Roy drinks rather a lot, and I think he'd been at the bottle. Anyhow, he went up to have a chat with Fink-Drummond that evening and next morning he confessed to Daddy that he'd been sorry for our unwelcome guest and let him go.'

Hemmingway shrugged. 'Well, as it was much too late f°^r Finkie to have done any harm, it doesn't really matter. In any case it wouldn't have been fair to leave him a prisoner with the chance that an earthquake might bring down the house, we'd have had to free him before taking to the Ark ourselves-

Margery nodded. 'You'd better run up and let Sam out yourselves. It'll be a glorious surprise for him. I must hurry and get breakfast ready because the others'll be down in a moment.'

Up in the nursery they found Sam. He was sitting, still fully dressed, hunched up in a chair with his head between his hands, and it was clear that he had not been to bed that night.

The second he saw Lavina he sprang up and, absolutely choking with relief, seized her in his arms; then, immediately his first excitement had subsided a little, he gripped and wrung Hemmingway's hand as though he would never stop. For the last hour Lavina and Hemmingway had been dreading that meeting but, when it came, Sam carried them both away by his intense, infectious joy at seeing them again. In a moment all three of them were talking at the same time; babbling out the hopes, fears and anguish through which they had passed during the last forty odd hours. As they went downstairs Gervaise and Oliver joined them. There were more kisses, embraces, handshakes. It was almost as though Hemmingway and Lavina had returned from a war or a journey to the North Pole.

Breakfast was a hurried meal as time was flying; but, as they ate, Lavina gave a carefully expurgated account of her adventures and Hemmingway helped her out when she was questioned about Derek and Roy.

On Sam's asking about the private papers which Hemmingway was to have brought down he had to confess that, having dropped the satchel containing them behind the counter in the tea-shop at Burgh Heath when the fight started there, the ensuing earthquake had caused him to forget all about it.

The loss of the papers was such a little thing compared to Lavina's safety that Sam only laughed about it; but the fact that they had been left behind reminded Lavina that the bags she had packed were still at St. James's Square and she had little hope that if Derek did arrive he would bring them with him.

Fortunately, she had left many of her older garments at Stapleton when she had run away three years before, so, taking Sam with her, she dashed upstairs to her old room. Spreading the coverlet from the bed on the floor they hastily pulled any of her clothes that they could find out of drawers and cupboards, flung them on the coverlet and made it up into a big bundle. By the time they had done, the others were shouting to them from the hall to hurry.

Everything except last-minute articles had been loaded into the Ark already so apart from Lavina's things there was little for them to carry down to it. After a last look round the house they crossed the lawn and walked along the edge of the lake to the landing stage beside the slips from which the Ark had been launched.

It was almost daylight and the sun was on the point of rising as they settled themselves in a big, flat-bottomed punt, and Gervaise and Sam began to pole them out to the centre of the lake where the Ark floated. The summit of the huge, steel sphere stood over sixteen feet above the water, as it was ninety feet in circumference and a little less than half submerged, with the two-foot-wide landing stage, which ran round its equator just clear of the lake's placid surface.

Ten minutes were occupied in poling the heavily laden punt out to the centre of the lake. Except for a few small fleecy clouds the sky was clear and they had covered only half the distance when the sun came up over the distant tree tops. As they reached the Ark the sinister pinkish light which heralded the rising of the terror of the heavens was already colouring the sky to the east.

Quietly but quickly Gervaise opened the steel door in the curved side of the Ark and, ducking their heads, they scrambled through into its interior. Having hitched the painter of the punt to the landing-platform, in case they might need it again later, he followed them inside and closed the steel door behind him. As he did so, the others were gazing from the port-holes of the Ark in silence and awe upon what was, perhaps, the dawning of the last day of the world.

Prepare For Death

Lavina and Hemmingway had seen the Ark when it had been nearing completion but not since it had been fully equipped and, on looking round them, they marvelled at the manner in which every spare inch of space had been made use of.

Its main deck was on the same level as the landing-stage that ran round its equator and its upper part was divided into five compartments.

One half of the upper part—a quarter of the whole sphere —was fitted up as a living-room, having a maximum length along its partition wall of 30 feet and a breadth, from the dead centre of the sphere to its rim, of 15 feet; which gave a semicircular floor-space of approximately 350 square feet—roughly that of a rectangular room measuring 20 by \1\.

The other half of the upper part was divided into four segments, two large and two small. The larger each had approximately 105 square feet of floor space, and the smaller 62 square feet, being the equivalent of rectangular rooms measuring, roughly, 12 by 9 and 10 by 6 respectively. Where the segments met there was a tiny hallway, measuring 4 feet by 3 feet, cutting off their points but enabling separate doors to lead into each of them. The two biggest consisted of a men's cabin and a kitchen; the two smallest, of a women's cabin and a bathroom with the usual conveniences.

The height of the segment rooms at their inner ends was 14 feet, which, allowing for the ceilings curving gently down to the outer extremity of the sphere, still gave room in the men's cabin for two sets of three bunks above one another on the partition walls; but the smaller, or women's, cabin had one set of two bunks only. At eye level in the curved walls there Were twelve thick port-holes, now covered with mica shades to neutralise the rays of the comet; six in the living-room, two each in the men's cabin and kitchen, and one each in the women's cabin and bathroom.

A trap-door in the centre of the living-room led downwards to a lower deck which was also divided into segments. Below it, where the bilge of an ordinary ship would have been, the space was utilised as a fuel tank; as the Ark had a keel which could be lowered to give it direction and an engine which would propel it although, owing to its shape, only in a calm sea at a few knots an hour.

The lower deck housed the engine-room, the electric-light plant, the heating plant and a number of storerooms which at the moment were chock-full of supplies. In addition to food, which Hemmingway had estimated would last the passengers in the Ark for a couple of months, most of their purchases of seeds and implements and a collapsible canvas boat were packed away there; as well as a number of oxygen cylinders for use in the event of the Ark's having to remain sealed for any considerable length of time and the air inside it becoming foul. Below decks there was also a baggage room for their spare clothes. Fortunately Hemmingway had had the forethought to send his down in advance and those of Derek and Roy had been stored there against their arrival.

Margery immediately took charge of the kitchen, Oliver began to potter among his scientific instruments, Gervaise busied himself adjusting the ventilators, while Sam went below to test the engines out once more. They had counted on Derek as their engineer but on his non-arrival Sam had spent several hours running over them, as his knowledge of engines was sufficient to enable him to take over at a pinch.

Now that they were on board the Ark, Lavina and Hemmingway felt the reaction from the strain of the previous days come suddenly upon them in all its strength. They were deadly tired and could hardly keep their heads up. There was nothing which required the urgent attention of either of them, so, at Gervaise's suggestion, they retired to their cabins to go to bed.

'Look! Look!' exclaimed Oliver, and Gervaise joined him where he was staring through one of the living-room's portholes. In the east the sun was now well up and below it, just above the distant trees, gleamed the red monster. It was bigg^ than the sun and flamed so fiercely that it would have been impossible to have looked at it without some protection for the eyes, but the mica screens provided that; although, even allowing for their colour distortion, it could be seen that the whole park was now transfused with a horrid, unnatural light.

'We shall find the suspense of the next sixteen hours very trying, I fear,' Gervaise remarked.

His brother nodded. 'I suppose you will but to me, of course, the whole thing is quite enthralling. Think of it, Gervaise, the millions of years that this world has been in existence; the asons of time it took to form the rocks. Even the life on our planet is a comparatively modern growth. Then, the great ages of the glacial periods and, coming nearer home to the sort of spans we can appreciate, the rise and fall of the great civilisations; Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, Mexico, Peru, Greece, Rome—the Christian era—a mere flicker of the eyelid in time, but so long to us. This might have occurred at any moment during all those countless years, yet it just happens in our time and we are to have the privilege of witnessing the end of it all at 10.55 tonight.'

'If it does come to that, I shan't mind for myself.' Gervaise shrugged. 'There is very little left in this modern age of cheap-jack bluster that appeals to me and, in spite of some difficulty in preserving my own standards, I have managed to have a not unpleasant time; but it's hard on the younger people who are just beginning their lives and can accept change more readily. Yes, it's hard on them and I'm hoping, still, that we may escape.'

Sam, who had just come up from the engine-room, remarked : 'We wouldn't stand an earthly if it were really coming slap at us as it appears to be at present; but since it's not due to hit the earth until long after sunset I think we've got a sporting chance.'

'I doubt it.' Oliver lit one of his long, strong-smelling cheroots. 'Even though the actual point of impact will be in the north-eastern Pacific some hundreds of miles west of Southern California, the shock will be so terrific that I cannot see how the earth can fail to disintegrate.'

They turned away then and went about their work again; but Sam refused to be depressed. He had reached Stapleton himself, as he had promised Lavina, on the afternoon of the 22nd. When he had failed to find her there he had spent an evening of ever increasing anxiety and sat up all night frantic with worry. To occupy his mind Gervaise had persuaded him to spend the morning of the 23rd overhauling the engines of the Ark, in case Derek failed them; but by midday Sam had been so distraught that he had declared his intention of returning to London. Feeling that if they allowed him to set off in search of Lavina his chances of finding her would be incredibly remote; and that if she arrived after all, as she still might at any time, she would become equally distraught at not finding him there; they had decided to lock him up for his own protection.

His fifteen hours' imprisonment had seemed to him like fifteen days, for during them he had conjured up every sort of harrowing vision in which the most frightful calamities had overtaken her. But now that she had arrived, tired yet safe and well, to relieve him of the frightful mental torture he had been suffering for the best part of two days, he felt that the worst positively must be over; that whatever happened he could not suffer like that again and that it would be a rank injustice on the part of Fate to destroy them both within a few hours of their reunion. Yet with him, too, the reaction from strain was setting in and Gervaise persuaded him also to go to bed for a few hours.

As Sam left them Oliver tried out the wireless but the atmospherics were so bad that they could not get a coherent reception from any station.

At ten-past eight there was another violent earth tremor. From a placid sheet of water the lake was suddenly broken into a small choppy sea with wavelets swishing up on to its banks, while the Ark began to rock and pull upon its anchors.

As the Ark consisted of two spheres, one within the other, its inmates hardly felt the shock. The gyroscopes kept the deck steady but they could judge the violence of the tremor by the way the outer sphere gave to it and its portholes oscillated over those of the inner sphere, temporarily making it impossible to see out of the Ark because the two sets of port-holes were no longer directly opposite to each other.

From that time onward lesser quakes occurred with increasing frequency until eleven when there was the worst upheaval they had so far witnessed, but after it the earth became quiet again. The sun and comet were now blazing from a brazen sky. It was intolerably hot and stuffy so that, although the ventilators of the Ark were fully open, Gervaise and Oliver sat perspiring in their shirt-sleeves and could breathe only with difficulty.

At Sam's wish, and with the willing consent of the others, Gervaise had been elected captain of the Ark and at midday he decided to release oxygen in order to revitalise the atmosphere.

Margery, sweltering in the kitchen but with her usual sense of duty to be done, insisted on cooking them a lunch; but no one except Oliver could do justice to it. Hemmingway, Lavina and Sam, having slept through the morning, were roused for the meal and appeared in dressing-gowns; but all of them were so tense with excitement that they could hardly manage to swallow a few mouthfuls of the food that Margery had cooked.

After the meal they tried the wireless again but it still gave out only a nerve-racking hotch-potch of unintelligible sounds. Then Sam helped to clear away. With a smile at Lavina, he said:

'Hadn't you better give Margery a hand in washing-up?'

She did not return his smile, and it was the first time Sam had known that happen since they had been married. Instead, she almost scowled, glanced down at her beautiful, slender hands, and replied quietly:

'If Margery wants any help she can call me; but if I've got to become a charwoman I rather hope the comet does hit us.'

She would have performed any menial task without complaint for a person she loved, providing it was not expected of her as a daily drudgery, but she saw no reason whatever why she should do anything of the kind when there was somebody else to do it for them. Margery was used to such things, and didn't mind them, so Lavina considered that Sam had been extremely tactless in drawing attention to her own laziness.

In the early afternoon there was another series of earthquake shocks, and, when the outer sphere of the Ark had righted itself again after one which was particularly severe, they were alarmed to see that the level of the lake was lower, and its waters appeared to be seeping away into some invisible chasm below it; but another shock restored the situation as a humped waterspout, about four feet high, suddenly appeared in its centre, and the waters came bubbling back to their original level.

It was shortly after this that they observed a group of people running across the meadows towards the southern shore of the lake. Through binoculars it was easy to study them as though they had been at comparatively close quarters. All of them were pouring with perspiration, and clad in the scantiest garments. On reaching the lake-side both women and men tore off their remaining clothes, and plunged into the water.

'It's the heat,' said Oliver, tapping the dial of a thermometer which registered the temperature outside the Ark. 'It's over 120 degrees in the sun out there, as hot as in the Sahara. They're trying to cool themselves by taking refuge in the water.'

'Poor wretches,' sighed Lavina. 'Can't we possibly take some of them into the Ark? It's too awful to see them suffering like that.'

'We've only got two spare bunks—those that Roy and Derek should have occupied,' Sam replied doubtfully.

But they were not called upon to make any such terrible decision as to whether they should overcrowd the Ark or leave the distraught people to their fate. Another tremor churned up the waters of the lake and, staggering to its banks, the terrified bathers dashed away stark naked over the meadow.

⁴ "Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad,"' quoted Gervaise, 'and it seems that a merciful god is intervening in this instance. The comet's rays must be so strong now that everyone exposed to them is probably quite ignorant of what he is doing.'

Lavina caught Hemmingway's eye but they both looked quickly away from each other again.

'That's it,' agreed Sam, 'and if they have been driven mad they'll at least be saved from this awful suspense or any real understanding of what's happening when the last phase occurs tonight.'

Sweltering still, they lay about in the easy-chairs while one or other of them continued to keep a look-out through the port-holes. It was about half-past four when Margery suddenly cried:

'Look! There's a car coming.'

They jumped to their feet and peered out in the direction of the drive, which was visible for some distance until it was hidden where it curved up to the house. A low, long-bonneted car was streaking along it.

'By Jove, it's mine!' exclaimed Hemmingway.

'Derek!' cried Lavina. 'Derek's got here after all!'

The car suddenly swerved from the drive, apparently out of control, and came charging down the bank towards them. Leaving the grass it plunged into the water, sending up a great sheet of spray, and wallowed to a halt, half-submerged and with its tyres bogged in mud, about ten feet out from the bank. Its driver was thrown violently forward across the wheel and remained there sagging over it.

'Quick! We must get him!' cried Sam, as Gervaise sprang to the door of the Ark.

The second he opened it a blast of hot air surged in, searing them like the breath of a furnace. But the men of the party all scrambled into the punt and started to propel it as swiftly as they could towards the water-logged car. Running to the door th? girls watched them as they dragged Derek's limp body from the wreckage and, having lain it in the bottom of the punt, began to pole back as though all the devils of hell were after them.

When they reached the Ark perspiration was streaming from them; their shirts were soaking with it and all of them, temporarily affected by the comet's rays, were laughing or cursing insanely. Gasping, swearing, staggering about like drunken people, they pulled Derek into the Ark and slammed its door shut again.

It was several moments before the rescuers recovered physi-^cally or mentally from their brief adventure, but the two girls carried Derek's unconscious form into the men's cabin, bathed his face, undressed him and got him between the sheets in one °f the bunks.

Ten minutes later Gervaise, his handsome, aquiline features ^L|nusually grave, came to look at Derek and, after a brief examination, declared that he was suffering from concussion through his head's having hit the windscreen of the car so hard as he was thrown forward. They did what they could for him and tucked him up; but Gervaise thought it probable that he would not come to for several hours and feared that, when he did, he might have lost his sanity from having been exposed for the whole day to the comet's rays.

Unnoticed by them while they had been looking after Derek, the sky had started to cloud over. Great, dense, sharp-edged, thunderous masses were rolling up from the east and the wind was rising.

By six o'clock both the sun and the comet had been blotted out and the force of the wind had become terrific. They could not hear its screaming as the Ark was now sealed again, but watching through the port-holes they could witness the effect of the gale.

With greedy insistence the wind was tearing at the leaves of the trees and shrubs in the park. Small branches were being broken off and carried bouncing away across the grass. Many of the smaller trees were bent right over in sharp curves. A great elm was torn up by its roots and crashed to earth. The wind increased to hurricane violence, bushes were uprooted and blown like pieces of paper across the unkempt garden. Tree after tree snapped under the terrific strain.

The sky was still black but by the discoloration of the mica over the port-holes they knew that the awful red light must still be shining through it. Another 'quake came and then the rain.

It streamed down with tropical fury, in such a spate that they could not see a yard beyond the port-holes, and it seemed that the very heavens had opened, just as in the Biblical account of the Flood.

By seven it had eased a little and great jagged streaks of lightning flashed almost continuously from the pitch-black sky. Even the fact of the Ark being sealed did not prevent the crash of the thunder reaching them. In peal after peal it rolled through the heavens like the echoing broadsides of great guns. The lake was churning like an angry sea and the outer sphere of the Ark was rocking wildly; but its internal platform was still held steady by its gyroscopes and its anchors prevented it from being washed up on the lake shore.

•The house!' cried Gervaise suddenly. 'The house!' And through the murk they saw a red glow up the slope in the distance. Stapleton Court had been struck by lightning and one side of it was burning fiercely.

A quarter of an hour later the rain ceased and they watched the fire as it ate up the old mansion. Gervaise seemed heartbroken. It had been his home for so many years. He had resorted to so many shifts to keep it out of the clutches of mortgages; exercised so much ingenuity to preserve it and its parklands from the hands of vandals. Even so sober a man could not quite grip the fact that a roving comet might really destroy the whole earth in a few hours' time. Somehow he had always felt that after a brief sojourn in the Ark he would return to that beloved home, and now, whatever might befall, that could never be; it was being consumed before his eyes by flames.

Sam began to mutter useless words of comfort but Lavina promptly stopped him; she knew better than any of them, even Margery, what her father was feeling in those moments.

The lake had overflowed its banks, flooded by the terrific downpour. On one side it now stretched for half a mile across low-lying meadows, on the other it had risen half-way up the sloping lawn below the house. From time to time earth tremors made it sink or rise with startling suddenness and agitated its waters until they became like a rough sea, while on its shores oaks and elms crashed earthwards.

By eight o'clock the house was a flaming pile, more than half-consumed; but without warning another cloudburst shut it out from them and the spate of water was so solid that when the torrent eased, just about nine, they saw that it had extinguished the fire in the burning mansion.

From what little they could see through the still sheeting rain the tempest raged without abatement. The lake was half full of shattered trees which had been blown into it and were now being thrown about upon the heaving waters. Earth tremors shook the land almost without cessation; fork-lightning streaked the skies; earsplitting thunder boomed and reverberated overhead; the fury of the elements was indescribable.

From the time that they had rescued Derek the inmates of the Ark had thought of nothing but watching the incredibly terrible spectacle which was occurring before them. Hour after hour they had remained by the port-holes peering from them at every opportunity; nobody had even thought of suggesting an evening meal; they had forgotten the time and the fact that the chronometers might be ticking out the last minutes of their lives.

It was Oliver who recalled them to the probability of their impending fate by saying quietly:

'In case any of you wish to make last-minute preparations, I think I ought to warn you that it is now 10.45. We have only ten minutes to go.'

They left the port-holes then and looked at each other. It seemed that there was nothing to say, nothing to be done but to commend themselves to the mercy of the Father of all things.

Oliver alone remained near his instruments checking and recording. Margery went a little apart and, kneeling down, bowed her head in prayer. Sam's instinct was to follow her example but Lavina stood beside him holding his hand and he did not like to withdraw it. Gervaise had never made his daughters follow a conventional religion. Since Margery liked going to church he showed his tacit approval because he recognised that such devotions took the place of other things for certain types of women but when, at the age of sixteen, Lavina had told him that she djcl not wish to go to church any more because it bored her, he told her that, in that case, the church had ceased to serve any useful purpose for her. Lavina had never gone again but she was supremely confident that there was a God who would deal justly with her if she died, without her kneeling down to mumble set phrases or personal pleas for assistance.

She stood there with her chin up, staring with unseeing eyes at the wall of the Ark. Sam was beside her and Gervaise, on her other side, put an arm gently round her shoulders. Hemmingway sat down in an armchair opposite them and lit ^a cigarette. He had decided, quite disapassionately, that she was superbly beautiful and as he gazed up at her face the artist in him took a curious delight in the thought that, if they had to die, that living masterpiece was the last thing he would ever see.

Those last minutes seemed to drag interminably. The lake outside was still like a storm-tossed sea. The terrific downpour continued. Earthquake shocks were still felt through the buffer of the surrounding waters.

Sam was thinking over and over again: 'It can't happen. It can't happen—not to us.' Gervaise, that this was the greatest adventure that anyone could ever set out upon; either they would be blacked out in a few minutes or be re-born into a strange new world; Lavina, that she had had a lot of fun in this life and that it wouldn't be her fault if she didn't have a lot of fun in the next. Hemmingway was wondering vaguely if death would take them instantaneously or if they would first be called on to face awful torments -and, in the meantime, gazing enchanted at the perfection of Lavina's face. Margery was hypnotising herself with a rapid repetition of whispered words.

The tense silence was shattered by Oliver's voice as he announced quietly: 'By Greenwich Mean Time it is now 10.55.'

The Comet Strikes

For a moment nothing happened—nothing at all. They stared at each other waiting, wondering, holding their breath, tensing their muscles in an agony of suspense.

Suddenly the Ark began to rise. They could no longer see what was going on outside, but it felt for a second as though they were in an'express lift soaring upward.

There was a terrific jerk. Both the cables had snapped as the huge sphere was flung sideways right out of the water. It hovered in the air for a second then came plunging back into the lake. The electric lights flickered and went out. The mechanism of its gyroscopes was constructed to counter roll; not to withstand violent shocks. The floor tilted. Instantly the whole cabin was in confusion. Oliver fell backwards from his instruments; the others staggered, lost their balance and pitched for ward on their faces. The chairs slid sideways, bumping into one another. Books, boxes, binoculars and a score of other things crashed to the floor and rolled about it as the Ark, its gyroscopes broken, lurched heavily from side to side in the frightful upheaval.

Terrified, gasping, they scrambled to their knees and clun? to its solid fixtures to prevent themselves being flung backwards and forwards. Gradually the deck steadied a little a"¹ they were able to get on their feet again. Gervaise found th^e switch of the emergency lights and turned them on.

The outer port-holes no longer oscillated above the in^ner ones as the sphere rolled and, staggering to them, they ^vver' able to peer out. Almost with surprise they saw that, excep for the fact that they had been carried a hundred yards nea^ to the north shore of the lake, the scene remained unaltete . The lake was still a tossing sheet of spray. The rain still shee^ down and through it, by the jagged flashes of lightning t» still lit the sky, they could see that the landscape of lake-shore, trees and ruined mansion was just the same.

With a shout Sam seized Lavina. 'We've come through, darling! D'you understand—we've come through! We're going to live now.'

Gervaise drew a deep breath. 'Yes, we've passed through the Valley of the Shadow and come out the other side.'

'I wonder what sort of a world is left to us, though,' Hemmingway said gloomily.

Margery felt sick and ill from the buffeting they had sustained but was thinking of the home in which she had lived all her life. During the last ten years much of her time had been spent in household drudgery but she had not really disliked it, and now the house was a burnt-out ruin. She had never altogether brought herself to believe in the comet, even though she had seen it, because she had a life-long habit of ignoring facts if they were unpleasant ones.

The business of preparing the Ark had been to her rather like getting ready a temporary home in which they were all going to live for a while, but she had never visualised its being flung into space or smashed to pieces. Instead, she had definitely persuaded herself that, having taken refuge there for a few hours, or days at the most, they would land again and she would take up her household routine just where she had left it off. But now there was no house and, for the first time, she really began to worry about what was to become of them all.

Now it seemed that their lives were out of danger Gervaise, too, was thinking of the house. The home that he had clung to for so long, through every financial difficulty and all the attempts which his friends had made to persuade him to sell 't in order to ease his situation, was now gone—or most of it. ^e peered again through the sheeting rain and waited till pother flash of lightning lit the building. The southern half of 't Was still standing and he said with relief:

'Some of the rooms may still be habitable and, anyhow, I ^lllink the stables have remained intact.'

The Ark was now adrift and the wind-swept waves drove it ^to the east side of the lake where it gently grounded on the ^ttd some twenty yards from the shore. Another earthquake tremor, now impinging directly on it, suddenly flung then all off their feet and for a few minutes afterwards the Ark pitched heavily from side to side again making their stomachs rise, in the case of Margery and Sam to such an extent that they had to disappear.

'I expect the 'quakes will go on for some time,' Oliver said, when the Ark had steadied and the more hardy members of the party had settled themselves once again. 'The ferment caused by the penetration of the earth's crust by a foreign body is certain to cause terrific agitation.'

'Is that what you think has happened?' Hemmingway asked,

'I imagine so. The comet was certainly solid or we should not have felt the shock; but it couldn't have been as big as I feared. As it came down in the north-eastern Pacific the depth of the waters there would have proved a buffer to some small extent but the crust of the earth isn't very thick and the forward curve of such a spherical mass would almost certainly penetrate the rock-layers; even if the back half of it is now standing up out of the waters like some huge new island continent.'

'How's that going to affect us?'

'It's impossible to say. The comet may have been the six of the Isle of Wight or the size of Australia, but I doubt if it could have been as large as the Dominion or it would almost certainly have shattered the earth to pieces.'

'It may have formed a new continent for us, then?' murmured Hemmingway speculatively.

Lavina laughed nervously. 'Are you already thinking of planting the Union Jack there and annexing it for Britain?'

'Hardly,' he smiled. 'There are probably plenty of people who took refuge in cellars and have survived like ourselves-but hundreds of thousands must have died or gone mad, so' should think those of us who have come through will h^aV£ all our work cut out to get this country running again befa^re bothering about any others.'

'Since the moment of impact the comet may no longer be³ solid mass,' Oliver went on. 'There is a theory, which son⁵ geologists believe, that another comet hit us many millennia¹¹ ago and broke into thousands of pieces which we know todW as the South Sea Islands. They say it caused the flood wh^|C submerged Atlantis. In any case, I shouldn't think that anyone has been left alive in western North America, and the Far East must have suffered severely, too. Tidal waves as high as mountains will have swept everything before them on both coasts of the Pacific.'

The Ark had grounded again and the storm outside seemed to be abating a little although a minor tremor still occasionally agitated the waters of the lake.

'How long d'you think it'd be before any tidal wave could reach us here?' inquired the persistent Hemmingway.

'Tidal waves travel at great speed,' Oliver replied. 'If a sympathetic disturbance has taken place in the Atlantic earthquake zone and the resulting wave is great enough to sweep over western Britain it might reach us in three hours. Say we allow a margin of a further two hours; if nothing has happened by four o'clock in the morning I think we may consider ourselves safe.'

'In any case we only have a local flood to fear now,' Sam put in, 'and as the Ark was built for just such a contingency we haven't got much to worry about.'

'Sure,' nodded Hemmingway. 'But now the gyroscopes have gone we may receive an awful buffeting.'

'Oh, dear! And I shall be so ill,' sighed Margery.

'We shall be far better off than we should be in any other kind of craft,' Gervaise consoled her. 'As the Ark is unsink-able our lives are safe and after drifting for a few hours we are certain to be washed up somewhere.'

Sam went below to try and get the main lighting plant going again. The others settled down to wait. Time dragged interminably. Lavina smoked cigarette after cigarette until the air °f the cabin was blue. Just after midnight the full lights came °n, and Sam rejoined them. They talked, fell silent, talked ^again. They tried to keep conversation going but the strain ^was appalling. One o'clock came, then two. The seismograph showed that the shocks were gradually lessening in intensity.

three o'clock they were incredibly weary but beginning to ^°pe that they would escape the perils of a flood. At four °hver stood up and reopened the ventilators.

,'You think we're pretty well out of the wood now?' Hemingway asked him.

'Yes. As far as I am in a position to judge.'

At Oliver's pronouncement they all heaved a sigh of relief, and Lavina said suddenly: 'I'm feeling awfully hungry.'

Immediately she had spoken all the others realised that they too were hungry. It was fifteen hours since they had sat down to lunch and even then they had eaten little.

'I'll cook something,' Margery volunteered. 'How about ham and eggs? Would that do?'

'Fine!' Hemmingway laughed. He was thinking how the simple mention of such a good, homely dish seemed to restore things to normal again. They were still alive and there was now every chance that they would go on living.

'I'll give you a hand,' said Sam, following Margery into the kitchen. 'In my younger days I used to be rather a dab at cooking. My old mother taught me when we lived in Bradford, and some time I'll treat you all to some Yorkshire cookies.'

'You're not suggesting we're here for ever, are you?' asked Lavina.

'Good Lord, no, darling!' Sam patted her shoulder. 'But we'll have to make this our headquarters for a day or two; anyhow until we can find out what's going on in the rest of the country. As you're no good in a kitchen, you'd better lay the table. You'd make a splendid Nippy.'

Lavina's white teeth bit into her small, very slightly drooping underlip. She was very glad still to be alive but she had never thought of herself as a Nippy and did not take the suggestion as a compliment. Sam had been brought up in an artisan's home where the women of the family did all the work; but when Lavina had been a child Gervaise had still been able to afford servants at Stapleton. Except for a little assistance at such picnics as she had decorated, Lavina had never waite¹ upon anybody in her life and she saw no reason at all wW she should start now. She ignored Sam's suggestion, and-although she hated any form of nursing, declared that, sin^ce everybody else seemed to have forgotten him, she was to have a look at Derek.

When she returned to report that Derek did not appear ^tl have suffered from the upheaval and, although still unco¹¹ scious, was breathing stertorously, Hemmingway was just >' ishing laying the table.

Gervaise felt that, having survived the cataclysm, they were all entitled to a glass of wine from the limited stock for which they had been able to spare space in one of the store-rooms and, going down the hatchway, he brought up a couple of bottles of Bollinger.

When the meal was served they had to be careful how they ate it as, now that it was grounded again, tremors shook the Ark every few moments and just as they were finishing there was a moderately severe one which set them afloat for several minutes. But the food and wine did them good and at a quarter-past five they crawled into bed in a more cheerful mood than had been possible all through the long and anxious hours since the previous morning.

Such sleep as they got did little to refresh them as the sheeting rain drummed a tattoo on the top of the steel sphere, and tremors woke them which made them feel sick and queasy. About ten o'clock they foregathered once more in the living-room; a scarecrow crew, the two girls tousled, the men unshaven, Hemmingway with a three-day beard.

The skies were leaden grey and it was still raining, but daylight enabled them to examine the scene of desolation around them. Branches, uprooted bushes and whole trees were floating in the lake; and the meadows, too, were dotted with the debris of the storm. The entire landscape was haggard, dreary and depressing beyond description.

At breakfast, to which they sat down in dressing-gowns, they were rather silent; and, afterwards, Lavina declared that she was going to have a bath. The others voted it a good idea hut as it had been her suggestion, they naturally let her have first turn in the bathroom.

After she had been there for half an hour Margery called °ut to know how much longer she was going to be, but her cheerful treble came back to them:

'What's it matter how long I am? We've got all day before haven't we?'

She stayed there for a good hour and then disappeared into |he cabin which she shared with Margery. The others took their ^baths in turn, sat about, read and talked at intervals until '^Ur>chtime, while the rain descended without intermission, still frther swelling the lake. Margery prepared the meal as usual

H and the others laid the table. When it was ready they shouted to Lavina.

It was another ten minutes before she appeared and, when she did, they all stared at her in astonishment. Throughout the previous day she had worn the bedraggled garments in which she had spent her captivity and made her escape out of London: her only attempt to restore her appearance having been to comb her hair back flatly on her head in imitation of the Garbo. Now, however, she had selected a girlish summer dress from among the old clothes she had collected at the house before coming aboard the Ark, and had spent the entire morning beautifying her person. Her hair was curled; if not with the art of the professional hairdresser, at least in a simple and graceful fashion. Her nails were repainted and her make-up as perfect as if she had been going to a Royal Garden Party.

'Well, what are you all looking at?' she asked with supreme self-satisfaction.

'You, of course,' said Sam with a chuckle.

'Oh? What's wrong with me?' she smiled back innocently.

'Why, nothing. It's a joy to see you looking the Princess again. I like that little frock, too. It makes you appear even younger than you really are.'

'Thank you, darling.' She sat down at the table. 'I saw no reason why I should continue to go about looking like something the cat sicked up just because we have to remain cooped up in this thing for a day or two.'

Margery stiffened, and, apparently unable to contain herself, left the table. Dashing into the kitchen she slammed the door behind her.

Lavina looked up wide-eyed. 'What on earth's bitten her? she inquired, raising her carefully plucked eyebrows.

There was an awkward silence until Gervaise said: 'I fea^r she took your remark personally.'

'Naturally,' said Sam, with a worried glance at his beautiful young wife. 'Between clearing up after breakfast, looking afte^r Derek, and preparing lunch she hasn't had a moment to tid> herself; whereas you've been gilding the lily the whole morning. I'm sure you didn't mean it, darling, but it was damned tactless of you, and you'd better go and apologise.'

Lavina's eyes snapped. 'Of course I didn't mean it. H^oVf absurd! But Margery always was over-sensitive. She imagines that everyone is always thinking about her. I was only expressing a personal opinion as to the best way in which I can keep up my own morale while we have to remain here.'

'Well, you'd better go and tell her so,' said Sam.

'Certainly not. Why should I apologise for something I never said—or, at least, never intended to refer to her?'

'Margery can be very stupid sometimes,' said Gervaise quietly, 'but that's not her fault. I think it would be a gracious act, dearest, to tell her you weren't thinking about her at all, don't you?' He knew his Lavina infinitely better than Sam did, and she rose at once.

'Of course, you old sweet, if you want me to, and I'll offer to set her hair for her this evening into the bargain.'

When the two girls returned from the kitchen everyone began to talk at once, to cover Margery's embarrassment, and Lavina inquired quickly what Gervaise thought of Derek's prospects of recovery.

'He's still unconscious, as you know,' Gervaise said. 'J had a look at him several times during the night, and this morning we stripped him and washed him all over. He was in a shocking mess with bruises and cuts, but otherwise uninjured, apart from his head.'

'That'll be the packet he got when he was beaten up in Hyde Park,' declared Hemmingway, 'unless he's collected a fresh lot since.'

T don't think so,' Gervaise shook his grey head. 'All his major injuries were bandaged, so they're almost certainly the ones to which you attended three nights ago. I put fresh lint °n them, but until he comes round there's nothing else we can do.'

'I can't think why Roy wasn't with him,' remarked Oliver. 'It's been worrying me all night.'

'But they became separated in Hyde Park. We told you, Oliver, dear,' murmured Lavina, with a warning glance at Hemmingway.

'That's it,' he agreed, 'and Roy may still be quite all right. I expect most people are who had the sense to go underground Yesterday, and so avoid the rays of the comet.'

'Well, we can only hope so,' Oliver sighed.

Directly after lunch Lavina set about clearing the things and washing up without making any parade of doing so as, having decided to do it, her one idea was to get through the business as quickly as possible.

During the afternoon the weather cleared a little, but the tremors continued, and they sat about uneasily, disinclined to read as the shocks still made them feel sick and shaky every time they came. At four o'clock the sun broke through the clouds, but it was a pale, watery disc, quite unlike the splendid giver of light and life which had been blazing upon them throughout the mid-June days. Its sinister companion now having rushed from the heavens to bury itself in the North Pacific, the red radiance had disappeared, and, removing the coloured mica shades from the port-holes, they looked out once more upon a landscape of normal colours. The lake was greatly swollen from the hundreds of tons of water that had rushed into it both from the skies and down its slopes. The broken trees looked more bedraggled than ever, and the fields to the south were flooded as far as they could see.

What with Lavina's incessant smoking, Oliver's cheroots, and all the others puffing at cigarettes from time to time, the atmosphere of the big room had become so loaded that it was almost blue. On Margery's remarking on it, Gervaise suggested that they should get some air and exercise by walking round the circular landing-stage outside the Ark.

The damp, cool air soon cleared their heads, and they began to feel more cheerful as they followed each other round and round the narrow platform in single file like, as Sam jokingly said, a bunch of convicts.

Once a sudden 'quake nearly threw them off their balance-but they halted in their tracks, and, flattening themselves against the curving sides of the sphere, hung on by its lifelines until the tremor was over.

Hemmingway was leading the little procession, and it was just five o'clock when, having circled the Ark a dozen times-he passed round its eastern side, and again reached its northern flank. The second he could see round the curve to westward he gave a shout of dismay.

'Run! Run!' he cried. 'Get back inside!' And plunging f°^r' ward himself, he dashed towards the door. It was about for^£> feet away, in the section of the Ark that was facing south-south-west, and, although he was by no means a coward, as he ran his scalp began to prickle with sheer horror. Some of the others followed him, the rest turned and headed back the other way; but a moment later all of them were goggling at the terrifying thing that he had been the first to see.

To westward, over the burnt-out mansion, something that looked like a solid black cloud was advancing rapidly. It had first appeared as a long, low line over the distant trees, but with extraordinary speed its dead flat edge, straight as a ruler, seemed to leap up into the sky. It was denser than any cloud, and at the second glance they realised that it was a huge wall of water; a vast tidal wave, hundreds of feet in height, approaching at the speed of a racing aeroplane and engulfing hills, trees, gardens, as it rushed upon them.

A mighty wind, caused by the air displaced by the oncoming terror, moaned through the trees, its note increasing to a scream. Trees were snapped off short or torn up by the roots and carried high into the air. From a dull, sullen murmur the voice of the rushing waters leapt in a moment to a thunderous roar. The whole earth shook, winced, and writhed, and tormented nature screamed aloud in a hundred tongues as, tumbling over each other, the six humans fell into the Ark, and Sam, who was last in, slammed its door.

Scrambling to their feet, they staggered to the port-holes, and Hemmingway was just in time to see the ruined house crumble to pieces as the giant wave crashed against it and roared on.

Next second it had blacked out the whole landscape, and towered above them to the skies.

'Hold on!' yelled Gervaise; and, as they gripped the nearest fixtures, the Ark shot forward like a bullet from a gun, carried away deep in the roaring waters.

For minutes on end they were too terrified even to attempt ^to think. It was as though some gigantic foot had kicked the hall and sent it spinning. They were flung from side to side ^atld from floor to ceiling like a handful of peas in a tin that is ^ser>t rolling down a hillside. Screaming, groaning, their muscles drenched, their senses reeling, they clung with the strength of desperation to any fixed object they could get a grip on until another twist of the sphere dragged them from it.

At last, the engines and stores in the lower portion of the Ark steadied it and brought the deck almost horizontal again.

Panting, groaning, sobbing, they picked themselves up. As they did so, the Ark began to rise.

The lights had gone out, which added to the confusion, and the port-holes showed only as faint, grey patches in the blackness. But as the sphere wobbled upwards they lightened, and it seemed as though a mass of turgid green water was rushing downwards past them with here and there a dark object glimpsed for a second, which might have been a tree trunk or a body.

With unexpected suddenness daylight flashed into the room again. The air the Ark contained had brought it rushing to the surface; its speed had increased as it rose, so that it popped up like a cork, almost leapt clear of the water, splashed back, and settled to a heavy roll.

To add to the discomfort of the shaken and bewildered party, the floor was now awash with nearly a foot of water which had spurted in through the ventilators, Gervaise having had no time to close them. Slowly and painfully they began to pull themselves together.

All of them were bruised, giddy, half-fainting. With the water splashing about them, and the Ark still lurching from side to side, they dragged themselves to sitting positions, and began to examine their injuries. Hemmingway lay still, under the table. At first they feared that he was dead, but Sam crawled over to him, and, raising his head, found that he had only been knocked unconscious. Oliver was moaning with a broken arm, Margery was being violently sick. Lavina, chalk-faced and gasping, was wishing she could die where she lay, her back propped up against a bookcase.

Gervaise had suffered least. He had managed to throw hinv self down in the small hallway where the other cabins opened into the living-room and, bracing himself with his shoulders against one door and his feet against another, had succeeded in preventing himself from being flung about like the rest.

Standing up, he went over to help Sam with Hemmingway-As they lifted him into a chair Sam groaned from the pain of ^a wrenched ankle. Lavina pulled Margery to her feet and, half leading, half carrying her, pushed her into another chair; then she flung herself, sobbing, into Sam's arms. He nearly fell. She was heavier than she looked, but he managed to support her and, staggering to the settee which ran round two sides of the dining-table, collapsed upon it, drawing her down beside him.

Gervaise helped his brother to a seat, and, looking round, saw that for the moment no more could be done for any of the shattered party. The first thing was to get the sphere clear of water. Wading through it, he fetched a broom from the kitchen; then, sloshing back across the living-room, he exerted all his strength and wrenched open the door of the Ark.

So far, he had had no time to think or to realise the full significance of what had happened to them; that they had been spared once again and were all alive seemed the only matter of importance. But, as he opened the door and the water gushed out round his knees, he drew a sharp breath. Using the broom to steady himself, he began to stagger slowly round the platform, gripping the handholds on the sphere's surface with his free hand as he went to prevent himself from being washed overboard.

Far away to the east there was a faint line of whiteness; the foaming crest of the colossal wave as it raced over the country devouring everything before it. He watched it for a few minutes until it had disappeared, fading into the grey of the horizon. Lurching on, he made the full circuit of the sphere.

When he reached the door again he remained there for a Moment motionless. They were at sea. The houses, trees, and fields of England lay hundreds of feet below them. On every side, as far as he could see into the grey distance, there lay only the gently heaving waters. They were utterly alone on a huge and desolate ocean.

The Great Waters

After Gervaise had come back into the Ark and swept it clear of water, his next job was to attend to the casualties. Witt Lavina's help he carried the unconscious Hemmingway fat: the men's cabin, but directly they entered it their attention was drawn to Derek by low groans issuing from his bunk.

Having hardly recovered their own wits after their fright ful tossing, they had not yet had a chance to think of him: but when the Ark had been overwhelmed by the flood he, like themselves, had been thrown up and down like a pea in a box, and the bumping of his head on the upper bunk had brought him back to consciousness.

After the first blow he had instinctively braced himself against the sides of the bunk and so saved himself from being thrown out or from further injury, but during those awful moments when he was being whirled head over heels like a man in a revolving coffin he had not had the faintest idea where he was or what was happennig to him.

While Gervaise undressed Hemmingway, Lavina attended to Derek. It was now four days since he had received his beat-ing-up in the Park and three since he had been trampled on while escaping. But during the last twenty-four hours he had had complete rest, so only his major injuries still pained him. and when he regained consciousness he was perfectly clearheaded.

In his delight at seeing Lavina safe and sound he seized both her hands and kissed them. Giving him a quick kiss on the forehead in return she pushed him back into his bunk and, herseH still shaken by her recent terrifying experience, asked him ho^tf hs had come through the upheaval.

'Oh, I'm all right,' he smiled. 'Until you came into the rooffj I thought I was suffering from a nightmare. The great thing¹ that you're here in the Ark. God! What a time I had trying to gnd you. But what on earth's been happening?'

In a few brief sentences she told him of what had occurred when the comet had hit the earth and how a giant tidal wave had just carried them away with it; then, remembering Hemmingway's suggestion, she added that they had thought it wise not to tell Oliver of the fate that had befallen Roy.

He nodded. 'Yes, it'd be kinder not to let the old chap know that Roy was killed in a drunken brawl. If he'd been with me in the Park, we might easily have got separated when the prisoners burst out of the enclosure.'

'What happened to you after you left St. James's Square in Hemmingway's car?' she asked. 'He was furious about your taking it, you know.'

'Oh, damn Hemmingway! Just because he's got an outsize brain he behaves as though he were the Prime Minister, Chief of the Imperial General Staff and the Archbishop of Canterbury rolled into one. The smug fool! He tried to order me about as though I was a child, and I wasn't having any. Naturally I took his car. I was so darned anxious about you and there was nothing else to get around in.'

'You must have got the note he left, though, saying that he had found me; or didn't you go back to St. James's Square that night as you said you would?'

'No, I couldn't make it. The trouble was, I thought I'd traced you to Tilbury where they were loading a lot of women on to the liners in the Docks. I didn't get there till late afternoon and then the rays of the comet sent everybody berserk. People Were doing the most extraordinary things. One chap tried to kill me; and a bank manager, who had opened up his bank and Was standing outside it giving money away, insisted on my accepting a ten-pound note. I felt pretty gay myself but I more or less managed to keep my wits because the really urgent matter of finding you was never out of my mind. Getting back to St. James's Square didn't seem particularly important and it Wasn't till nearly eleven o'clock that I could get anybody to talk sense. Round about midnight I managed to hire a speedboat and went off to the Kenilworth Castle which was lying >n the estuary of the Thames. I found the woman I was looking f°r all right and she was pretty as a picture, but it wasn't you.'

'Poor darling. It was a gallant effort, though.'

'Well, naturally I did my damnedest. But when I got back to Tilbury I found that some A.R.P. people had commandeered Hemmingway's car. I had hell's own job to get it back again and I only succeeded after sun-up, when the whole world had started to go mad. I wasted two hours myself, playing shove-halfpenny with a fellow in the garage, before I suddenly woke up to the fact that I'd got a job of work to do. After that, the whole business was a kind of nightmare. I've no idea what time I got back to St. James's Square, but I read Hemmingway's note and set off again for Stapleton. The scenes I saw on my way down just beggar description and I was driving like a lunatic. I suppose the strain proved too much for me by the time I'd reached the park because everything simply blacked out.'

By this time Gervaise had stripped Hemmingway and got him into a suit of pyjamas. With Lavina's help he bandaged the injured man's head and he came round soon after they had lifted him into one of the bunks on the side of the cabin opposite to Derek. As the cut on his scalp did not appear to be serious they left the cabin to attend to the others.

Sam was hobbling painfully about fetching basins for Margery and trying to comfort her in the frightful bout of sickness from which she was suffering. Oliver sat patiently in a chair nursing his broken arm. They cut his coat-sleeve away and while they were setting the arm in splints he said:

'I've been working out what must have happened. When we built the Ark our purpose was to provide against the possibility of a tidal wave caused by under-sea eruptions in the Atlantic temporarily flooding the lower levels of Britain. But even given the most serious disturbances in that area, no wave of such magnitude as the one which caught us could possibly have been created in that way. Besides, I'm sure that any wave thrown up in the district of the Azores would have reached us long before.'

'What is your theory, then?' Gervaise asked. ,

'We know that the comet fell in the north-eastern Pacific. Oliver replied, 'and such a huge body would naturally d*⁵' place terrific quantities of water. That wave may have been a mile, or even two miles, high when it started. It must ha^ve traversed the whole of North America sweeping everything before it, poured into the Atlantic and forced the Atlantic waters up with its momentum so that it was still between a quarter and half a mile high when it leaped right over Britain. If I'm correct, it was travelling at more than 300 miles an hour.'

'Then the whole world will be drowned in another deluge,' said Gervaise.

Oliver winced as his brother tightened the bandage. 'The wave, which is still moving east, may exhaust itself by the time it reaches Central Europe; but the effect of the comet must have been like that of a stone thrown into a pond. Australasia will certainly have been overwhelmed and the Far East would have caught the full force of the wave as it moved westward, so the bulk of Asia is certain to be flooded too.'

'India might escape,' suggested Sam, looking up from where he was kneeling by Margery.

'Perhaps. The Himalayas and the highlands of Tibet should certainly be immune; but, even when the waters settle, the comet will have caused a great displacement. The oceans will have risen ten or perhaps twenty feet all over the world with the result that all low-lying lands will be under water. The Sahara will become a lake again and the plains of lower India are sure to be submerged.'

'This is much worse than we bargained for,' said Gervaise gravely. 'You will remember you felt originally that the Rockies would prove a sufficient barrier to any wave the comet might throw up. You thought that only portions of the western ^coast of American and places like Japan and China would suffer; while we should get off comparatively lightly, with a tocal wave which would subside in a few hours and leave us safely aground on the mud.'

'Yes,' Oliver confessed. 'This particular aspect of the catastrophe is far more serious than anything I had anticipated. I doubt if there will be a single human being left alive within ^tvvo or three thousand miles of us by tomorrow morning; and When a deluge of this magnitude is likely to subside it's quite '^possible to say.'

Sam gave him an anxious look. 'I suppose the danger now is that when the waters do settle we may have drifted so far that we won't even come down in England?'

'Exactly. We may find ourselves floating in the North Sea or the Atlantic; but, of course, I shall be able to keep a check on our position as soon as the sun breaks through again and I can take observations.'

'What I can't understand,' Sam went on, 'is why the Ark wasn't crushed like an egg-shell under all that weight of water. We must have been seven or eight hundred feet below its crest when the wave struck us and at that depth the pressure per square foot is simply enormous.'

Gervaise tied a neat knot at the end of the bandage he had been winding round the splints on his brother's arm. 'I think I can answer that. The pressure was mainly behind us and the sphere was free to move forward with the wave. Naturally, the Ark's buoyancy caused it to start moving upwards the second the water covered it. Where we were fortunate was, that it must have been carried up very quickly; otherwise it would have been smashed to pieces against the trees on the far side of the park.'

'Well,' said Lavina cheerfully, 'the great thing is we're still all alive and kicking. Come on, Margery, my dear; although I haven't got a bone left in my body, I'm going to put you to bed.'

Having attended to her sister while Gervaise got the electric light going again, she spent an hour tidying the cabin and generally took charge of all the arrangements in a way that Sam found surprising. As he could cook and she couldn't she made him cook the dinner, but with quiet efficiency she selected what they would have, laid the table herself and, when the meal was cooked, carried trays in for Derek and Hemming' way. None of them felt much like eating as the Ark was nov> rolling slightly but continuously yet she cajoled and bulli^ed them into eating up the food so that they should preserve their strength. When she was at last able to get to her cabin aⁿ° undress, she found on her body a dozen great bruises whicn were already turning a yellowish purple, and her head wa^s splitting with fatigue; but as she crawled into her bunk si¹ had the satisfaction of knowing that she had shirked nothing and gone through with the hideous business as well as any ⁰ trouper would have done when called upon to play a similar part on a nightmare film set.

The night passed uneventfully, but in the morning no land was to be seen and it was impossible to take an observation of the sun as the sky was still overcast with thick layers of dull, grey clouds. The compass showed them to be drifting west. It was raining gently and persistently as though it never meant to stop and a sudden change in the weather had made the temperature fall to such a marked extent that it seemed as if they had passed straight from June to October; but Sam coped with the heating plant, which had been thrown out of action, and once he had got it going the temperature in the Ark was soon adjusted.

Derek and Hemmingway both wanted to get up but, having taken charge of them, Lavina insisted that it would be better for them to spend the day in bed as, in any case, there was nothing for them to do and nowhere to go.

With her sister she was less merciful. Margery had passed a miserable night, but Sam's ankle was now swollen and Lavina decreed that he must keep it up; as there was no one else who could do the cooking, Margery would have to bestir herself, for an hour or two at all events, to attend to it. With the air of a martyr Margery obeyed the commands of her imperious younger sister while Lavina, who considered that she had done everything that was necessary, employed herself in amusing Hemmingway and Derek.

The two of them had had a brief slanging match after Hemmingway had come to the previous evening, following which they had agreed to forget the borrowed car; but a definite animosity still lingered and Lavina's presence was not calculated to have a soothing effect.

Derek had known her for so long that they had many subjects in common to talk about of which Hemmingway knew Nothing. She treated Derek with the familiarity of a brother ^and now called him 'darling' or 'my sweet' in the same way ^at she had been accustomed to throw casual endearments about among her friends in the film world. Hemmingway kept telling himself that he had not a shadow of right to resent heir cameraderie but he did resent it nevertheless.

On the other hand, Derek had little but his good looks and self-confident manner with which to attract Lavina's attention, whereas Hemmingway had not only an infinitely finer brain but a much quicker tongue, so he was able to offer much better entertainment.

Each would have denied it hotly if anybody had accused him of wishing to arouse Lavin's interest in himself, as they were both only too conscious that being married to Sam placed her out of bounds, but each was wishing secretly that he had her to himself, and cursing the presence of the other.

Lavina was perfectly conscious of the way they felt and, without the least malice, was thoroughly enjoying the situation. As Derek had very little to talk about outside the normal interests of a gentleman-farmer she had no desire at all for a tete-a-tete with him but while a heart-to-heart with Hemmingway would have intrigued her a lot she felt that would be too dangerous, in view of the experience through which they had been together.

After cooking lunch Margery retired to bed again, bemoaning the misery which the constant rocking of the sphere caused her. As there was nothing whatever for them to do Gervaise and Oliver decided to take a nap in the men's cabin where the two invalids were also dozing in their bunks. In consequence Sam, who had volunteered to keep a look-out although there was nothing to be seen on the vast expanse of waters which encompassed them, at last got Lavina to himself.

As the wireless was out of action she had just put a selection of records on the gramophone when Sam called her over to him. He was sitting in one arm-chair with his injured foot resting on another and, switching off the gramophone, she sat down in his lap. He petted her a little and then said quietly:

'My sweet, I've been wanting to have a chat with you.'

'Well, now's your chance,' she smiled down at him.

'It's about Margery,' he hesitated. 'You're not being very kind to her, are you?'

'My dear, I never give her a thought. She's just one of those people one doesn't think about. I gave up trying long ago but 1 certainly haven't been unkind to her.' .

'Don't you call it unkind to drag anybody who's feeling " out of bed to cook lunch?'

'Oh, that!' Lavina lit a cigarette and, tilting her aristocrat!⁰ profile in the gesture that Sam had so often admired, puffed out the smoke. 'Well, somebody had to cook lunch and you're the only one among us who can cook except Margery. I ought not to have let you cook dinner for us last night with a bad ankle like this and you must keep it up.'

'I know, my dear, but surely you could have knocked up some sort of a meal for us yourself instead of idling away the whole morning with Hemmingway and Derek? There's plenty of cold stuff among the stores; it only meant opening a few tins.'

'Really, Sam, I think you're being rather stupid. Margery's quite all right; only a little sea-sick, that's all. Why should you want me to treat her like a pampered baby?'

'She's a woman like yourself and entitled to consideration. Think of the fuss there'd be if anybody expected you to do a job of work when you were ill.'

T have, often. Naturally, I like people to fetch and carry for me. Why shouldn't they? They enjoy it. But many's the time I've walked on to a film set feeling like death and gone right through till the small hours of the morning in order not to hold up the rest of the cast.'

'Then I take off my hat to you, darling. But, all the same, I think you've got to take a different view of things from now on. Last week you were Lady Curry, a famous beauty with a millionaire husband, lots of servants and other people, either paid or willing, to run your errands in the sort of life we all knew. Now you're just my darling wife, Lavina, but that's the only thing that hasn't changed.'

'Like hell it is!' broke in Lavina, 'and how does that affect...' but, having got into his stride, Sam cut her short and went on:

'What's going to become of us, God knows. But we've plenty °f stores so if we're not wrecked in a storm we ought to be able to hang out until we land up somewhere. Whether we ^do or don't, everything's going to be different from now on. You've got to forget this Princess stuff, become a real woman, and do your share of the work. As you can't cook, the sooner you learn the better. I think you should start in at once as ^scullery-maid to Margery and when you've got the hang of it a bit you can do the job turn and turn about.'

Lavina removed herself from Sam's lap, stood up, yawned, and stretched gracefully. For the thousandth time he admired the perfect lines of her slim little figure which showed to admirable advantage in the silk shirt and old bell-bottomed trousers she was wearing that day.

Still with her back to him she said quietly: 'You know, Sam, I've never found you a bore before but this afternoon I don't find you the least amusing. I'm going to read in my bunk,' and without a glance in his direction she left him sitting there.

That evening she provided them with a cold supper for which Derek and Hemmingway, both now more or less recovered, got up. When the meal was finished she said suddenly :

'I've been thinking that we ought to divide up the work of the ship. Gervaise, as Captain, issues the stores and is a father to us all; Oliver's our navigator and looks after the instruments and things; Derek's the engineer, so he'll see to the electric light, the heating plant, and the motors if we have any chance to use them; Margery, quite obviously, was cut out for cook. That leaves Sam, Hemmingway and myself, doesn't it?'

They nodded agreement and she went on:

'Well, I'm easy. Somebody will have to mother you and I'm not at all bad with my needle; so if you loose a button or anything you'll know where to come. Hemmingway can lay the table and do mess-waiter and, as Sam loves pottering about in kitchens, he'd better be scullery-man and help Margery with the washing-up. That's fair division of labour, isn't it?'

'Fine,' Derek and Hemmingway agreed simultaneously while Gervaise, Oliver and Margery smiled their assent. In the face of such a clear majority Sam could do nothing. His clever little devil of a wife had out-manoeuvred him completely. She would sew their buttons on. Yes, when they lost them—which would be about once a month—and in the meantime she would lie about smoking and reading while the rest of them did all the work.

He saw her smiling at him beneath lowered lids and twitched his own mouth humorously in reply. He knew that, even if she sat about doing nothing day after day, she would provide them with splendid entertainment and keep their spirits up with constant laughter. That was her natural contribution; to be sup' remely decorative and delightfully amusing. He readily gave her the trick she had played him, realising that he had been a fool ever to suggest that she should use those lovely hands of hers except to stroke his own face.

Again next day the low grey clouds covered the sky as far as they could see in every direction, bearing out any chance of taking the altitude of the sun. To everybody's surprise Lavina appeared shortly after breakfast in an extremely abbreviated swim-suit with the intention, now the waters were calm and only lapping gently round the Ark, of bathing from its circular platform.

The instant Derek saw her he exclaimed: 'By Jove! What a grand idea. I'll be with you in ten sees.'

But by that time Lavina was back again inside the centrally-heated sphere. She loathed the cold and one sniff through her delicately-arched nose at the chill air outside had been quite sufficient to make her abandon all idea of having a swim. Nevertheless she did not change into anything else but lay about all day displaying her admirable limbs.

Hemmingway could hardly keep his eyes off her although he did his level best to expunge from his agitated brain the memories which crowded into it; and Derek fidgeted nervously to such an extent that Gervaise inquired what was the matter with him. He then got down Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour and, turning his back on Lavina, determinedly buried his nose in it.

After lunch there was trouble about the cigarettes. They had a fair supply on board but, with a view to making them last as long as possible, it had been agreed the previous night that they should each be issued with a packet of 20 Virginians per day, except Oliver who smoked only his own long cheroots. In addition, they were to allow themselves one Turkish cigarette each after lunch and dinner; for which purpose a box was to be kept in the drawer with the silver for passing round the table at the end of every meal.

As the first box of a hundred had been opened the previous night at dinner only five cigarettes should have been missing from it for Margery, being ill, had not had one; but a whole additional row was gone.

On opening the box Gervaise noticed the shortage at once and, looking round the table, said quietly:

'I'm afraid somebody's been cheating.'

'I have, darling,' Lavina confessed at once. 'Twenty cigarettes a day isn't half my usual ration. As I ran out last night, I raided the box before I went to bed.'

'Well, you mustn't do that sort of thing, dearest; it's not fair to the rest of us.'

'Now, don't get excited,' she said quickly. 'I only took a couple and I'm not having one after lunch or dinner today, to make things even.'

'But, my dear, there's a whole row missing,' he protested.

She shrugged. 'Well then, somebody else has been at the box besides myself. If I'd taken more than two I should say so.'

Gervaise knew that in many ways Lavina might be spoilt and selfish but quite definitely she was not a liar. She had never told him a deliberate untruth in her life and he would have staked his beloved home, had he still possessed it, on her veracity. He glanced round inquiringly at the others.

They sat there with blank faces and, after a moment, each in turn denied having had any hand in the matter, so the episode was closed. But it left an uncomfortable feeling and, as Lavina was such an inveterate smoker, those who did not know her as well as her father remained under the impression that she had taken a greater number of the cigarettes than she would admit.

She knew what they were thinking but nothing would have induced her to protest her innocence further; and she was extremely intrigued at the thought that the unusual conditions had already produced a sneak-thief and liar among them. Who it was she had no idea but, with the leagues of water on every side of them and no sign of land, she felt that time would show.

Adrift

The whole of that second day they spent nursing their hurts and recovering from their bouts of sickness. There were many things still to be done to put the Ark ship-shape but they felt too fagged out to give their attention to it and sat about dozing or speculating on what sort of fate the future might hold for them.

On the third morning after the flood it was still cloudy, but as the weather was calm all of them except Sam and Oliver put on their warmest clothes and went outside to get some exercise by walking round the platform. Although they had little hope of seeing a ship or raft with other survivors, they had kept a fruitless watch all through the previous days on the chance that they might sight a piece of high land which was still above the waters. Now as they made the first circuit of the sphere, they strained their eyes once again to peer into the distance by the pale, wintry, morning light, but in every direction the greenish-grey ocean stretched away unbroken to the horizon.

It was a depressing spectacle for, apart from their own Utter loneliness, they saw many evidences of the terrible fate which had stricken Britain. As the Ark drifted gently westward on the current the strangest collection of flotsam and jetsam bobbed along beside it, amongst which were great trees, chicken coops, odd pieces of furniture and dead cattle, poultry ^and human beings. Once they saw a structure which they thought might be another ark with living people in it, but as 't drifted closer it proved to be only a wooden barn. At another time they saw an overturned boat and a little later the wreck-^age of an aeroplane.

After a couple of dozen turns round the sphere the exercisers went inside again except Derek, who declared that he must keep fit somehow and, weather permitting, intended to do at least 500 turns a day; although he found later that he could not yet manage that number because he was still limping from his injured shin and it began to pain him badly.

Under Gervaise's directions they set about giving the contents of the Ark a thorough overhaul, a job they had not previously felt up to, and they spent several hours rearranging cargo that had shifted, fixing cords along the book-shelves and making many other arrangements to ensure that things should not be thrown about quite so readily if the sphere were to receive another buffeting.

It was as well that they had done so as, on the fourth day, a wind got up and from a gentle rocking the motion of the Ark increased to a heavy roll. Margery was ill again and Sam, too, was overcome by sea-sickness. By midday they could not see more than fifty yards from the port-holes as huge waves lashed the Ark, tossing it to and fro while blinding sheets of spray hissed over it. The constant rolling proved a frightful strain upon their nerves, as they could settle to nothing in any comfort but had to cling on to fixtures to prevent themselves from being thrown about.

Hemmingway had been feeling ill all day and lost what little lunch he had eaten. Lavina followed suit but she refused to go to her bunk and made those of the party who were still well enough play 'Consequences' with her.

Margery lay groaning in her cabin; Sam could not trust himself to stand for long on the heaving floor owing to his ankle, which although better was still weak, and none of the others felt like making tea; so Gervaise went below to get a bottle of brandy from their small cellar. When his grey head appeared above the hatch again and he staggered forward to a chair, Lavina noticed that his expression was unusually grave-

Looking round at them he said sternly: 'I should be glad it you would remember that when you elected me Captain of the Ark I stipulated that I should have control of all stores. One ot you has had a bottle of brandy out of the wine locker without my authority.'

Everyone denied having taken the bottle and Sam suggested that Gervaise might have miscounted.

He assured Sam that he had not. But Hemmingway ^wen below with him to check the cellar and pointed out that although, allowing for the bottle he had just brought up, there were now only ten out of the original dozen instead of eleven as there should have been, owing to the arrangement of the bins it was quite possible that there had only been eleven bottles there in the first place; and that one might have been found broken in the case when the whole consignment of wines and spirits had been unpacked on arrival from Justerini and Brooks' London cellars. As there was no other explanation Gervaise had to agree that it might have been so but, all the same, he felt quite certain that there had been twelve bottles of brandy there when he had taken a look round the cellar on the day before the comet had struck the earth.

It was pointless to argue further, so the matter was dropped. Their cellar space being limited, Hemmingway had ordered only of the best, and the mellow, sixty-year-old brandy warmed their stomachs; but the waves continued to thud upon the Ark, making the whole sphere shudder. Restless, uneasy and shaken, they made a scratch evening meal of biscuits and then as there seemed no object in remaining up they lurched to their cabins; but the storm continued throughout the night so they spent miserable hours pitching and tossing in their bunks, able to snatch only brief periods of troubled sleep at intervals.

Derek was first up the following morning and he noticed an unpleasant mess at one end of the living-room. When the others, a hollow-eyed, woebegone-looking crew, had assembled for breakfast, he pointed it out to them.

'I don't know who's responsible for that but, whoever it ^was, if they hadn't time to find a basin to be sick in, they might at least have mopped it up afterwards.'

Everyone looked at everyone else but no one confessed to having been the culprit and they were all so miserable that it hardly seemed worth holding an inquest on the matter. Derek, who was as strong as a horse and had never in his life known ^vvhat it was like to be seasick, mopped up the mess himself. On Gervaise's then insisting that they should try to eat a little 'f they could, as it would give their stomachs something to ^work on, the party sat down to the swaying table and sipped 'he hot coffee Margery had made for them in spite of her fetched ness.

For the whole of the fifth day the storm continued. Rain sheeted down, obscuring the view from the port-holes. The Ark alternately wallowed in the troughs of the waves or was cast high up on their crests to slide down a farther slope. It never actually turned over, owing to the weight of the stores on its lower deck which acted as ballast, but it pitched about in so terrifying a manner that even those who were not seasick were utterly worn out by the evening. Margery, Sam and Hemmingway lay prostrate in their bunks. Lavina was sick again but would not give in and staggered or sat about the living-room, her eyes unnaturally large, and her small face chalk-white.

On the second night of the storm it eased somewhat and the morning of the sixth day after the flood they crawled from their bunks to find that the sea had subsided to an oily swell. During the past few days the rocking of the Ark had been too violent for any of them to have a bath so they employed the best part of the forenoon in that way and by midday were feeling considerably better. The rain had ceased but low clouds still covered the whole sky, so, although they knew from the compass that they were now drifting south they were still unable to calculate their position and had not the faintest idea in which direction or the number of miles that the wind and currents might have carried them. It was still too rough for them to go outside and exercise without danger but by evening they were in normal spirits and had all taken up their allotted duties once more.

Twelve hours later the sea was calm again, but when they looked out of the port-holes they were amazed to see that it had changed colour: it was as black as ink. On going out on to the platform they found the explanation to be that the Ark was now drifting through a great expanse of water which had a foot of sodden black ash floating on its surface.

'This is the result of a terrific volcanic eruption,' said Gervaise. 'The ash has either drifted up here from southern Europe or we have been washed down there by the storm.'

Derek's leg was now all right and, as the sea was now calflj he decided to do his five hundred turns round the Ark but' was a raw and bitter morning so the others hurried insid⁶ again.

By an adjustment of the ventilators and the heating plant the interior of the Ark could be kept at a pleasantly warm temperature without becoming stuffy, so Lavina changed into an old suit of beach-pyjamas. As her normal high spirits had returned to her and they had now been cooped up in the Ark for over a week, she was becoming extremely bored. Having danced for an hour to the gramophone with Derek she decided to occupy herself by writing a film scenario and cast round among the others for possible assistance.

Sam declared that he was quite useless at that sort of thing. Oliver, who had become a little morose during the last few days, was still automatically busying himself with astronomical calculations which could now be of little value. Gervaise was too interested in the books on folk-lore he was reading. Lavina mentally ruled out Margery as having little imagination and, in any case, being much too busy with her work in the kitchen. That left only Derek and Hemmingway.

Derek was willing enough but, unfortunately, suffered from a complete dearth of ideas. His only contribution, forgetting for the moment the calamity which had overtaken the world, was that there would be a splendid appeal in it if she made her characters hunting people. Hemmingway, although he had failed in his attempts to sell such works of fiction as he had himself produced, at least understood the rudiments of the game and was brim-full of suggestions about types and scenes which might be included in Lavina's magnum opus.

During the next three days they worked out the story. Hemmingway thoroughly enjoyed the business but Derek did not. He thought it a silly game and would have thrown in his hand luite early on had it not been that he was not prepared to allow Hemmingway the satisfaction of remaining Lavina's sole collaborator. As it was, he used the gramophone as his ally to distract her with dance records as often as he could and, when ^she was tired of dancing, sat with them at their story-confer-®ⁿces, making occasional facetious comments which were "Signed to irritate Hemmingway but which Lavina found

amusing.

They had passed out of the area covered with floating ash ^ithin eight hours of entering it, since when the weather had ^remained fairly calm but almost consistently rainy. It was on the tenth day that they woke to find the grey clouds had changed to an angry black. Soon after breakfast a strange rain began which was more like black snow; ash-laden clouds from another volcanic area were releasing their burden and, within an hour, the sea was a blackish-grey from the rain of ash and small pieces of pumice-stone which came down with it. The same day, after lunch, Gervaise looked round the table and said:

'Listen, my friends. As long as the present weather conditions last it is impossible for Oliver to discover our position on the earth's surface. That in itself is not so vitally important; but the fact that we have not sighted land since the coming of the deluge is beginning to worry me. For all we know we may have been swept right out into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, and may drift there for weeks without coming anywhere near one of the mountain ranges which must still be left standing above the water. We started out with food enough to keep us alive for two months but it certainly will not last that length of time if one of you continues to steal it.'

Varying expressions of amazement greeted his remark, and Sam said at once: 'Are you suggesting that somebody has been raiding the stores the whole time?'

'I wouldn't go as far as that,' Gervaise replied quietly, 'as it was only three days ago that I first noticed a shortage; but I've kept a careful check on things since and there is no question about it, one of you is going below at night and helping yourselves to additional rations.'

They all shook their heads and there was a chorus of denials but Gervaise went on insistently:

'It wouldn't matter so much if any of you felt you werent getting enough to eat and asked for a little extra. Or, if th® guilty party feels that would be an exhibition of greed, ¹ wouldn't affect us very seriously if they confined themselves to taking an additional handful of biscuits or a tin of salmo" or something of that kind. The trouble is that whoever is ma^K ing these raids upon our stores cannot possibly eat all th they are taking. In the last three days enough food has ^dl appeared to have fed the lot of us during that time. Goodne knows what the person who takes it does with the b?-Ia° after he's had his midnight meal. But there it is.'

'How very extraordinary,' murmured Lavina. 'It's mighty serious,' Hemmingway said quickly. 'If the same amount of food that we use for our rations each day is disappearing every night, the stores will only last one month instead of two; and, including the two days before the flood that we spent in the Ark, we've been here getting on for a fortnight already.'

In vain they argued and speculated. While several of them had secretly believed that Lavina had been responsible for the shortage of Turkish cigarettes they nearly all suspected now that it was Derek who had been at the food. He was far the heartiest eater among them and had complained on several occasions of what he called the 'messy trifles' that Margery served up at some of their meals. Yet there was not the least evidence against him any more than against any of the others.

On the following day Gervaise found that another half-dozen tins of food had disappeared and, when he opened a fresh case of cigarettes, he discovered that somebody had been there before him and removed a good half of its contents.

That afternoon Sam got Hemmingway on his own for the moment and said: 'I've been thinking a lot about these raids on the stores and I'm sure I know who it is.' 'Who?' asked Hemmingway.

'Derek,' whispered Sam. 'It's certainly not Gervaise or he would never have raised the matter at all; it can't be Oliver because he couldn't open cases with one of his arms still in a sling. You can count the two girls out; I haven't done it; and I know you much too well to imagine that you'd ever do a rotten thing like that—so it must be Derek.'

'Perhaps,' Hemmingway agreed. 'He's always talking about 8ood, square meals and what he'd give to see an underdone steak again. But what I can't understand is, why he should take so much more than he requires each time?'

'Can't you?' Sam smiled a little grimly. 'I've got a theory ^about that. You know how badly he was beaten up before he Scaped from London; then he had concussion just before we 8°t him into the sphere. I believe that's affected his brain, not adly, but enough to make him irresponsible. He may even ^ave blank periods when he doesn't know what he's doing.

I'll tell you another thing that makes me think he's got a screw loose—the way he's always staring at Lavina.'

Hemmingway suppressed a smile. One did not have to be mad in order to derive a pleasure from looking at Sam's young wife. But although he had had ample opportunity to observe for himself the way in which Derek was always following Lavina with his eyes he did not think that any useful purpose could be served by admitting it and possibly aggravating the jealousy which the easy-going Sam was now showing for the first time.

'I can't say I've noticed it,' he shrugged. 'Derek and Lavina are pretty thick, of course, but that's quite natural because they've been friends for so long. You may be right about the food, though. Anyhow, we might keep watch tonight and see if he sneaks out of the cabin when he thinks we're all asleep.'

The alternate watches that they agreed upon proved, after all, to be quite unnecessary for the simple reason that when Derek failed to appear at dinner that evening Gervaise went below to look for him and found him lying face downwards, unconscious, on the engine-room floor, and by the time they had got him up through the trap-door and tucked up in his bunk it was quite clear that, even if he wished to, he would not be in a condition to do any raiding that night.

He had a nasty cut on the back of his head. When they had bathed it, bandaged it, and brought him round, Gervaise sent everybody else out of the cabin and began questioning him.

Derek's story was that he had gone down to clean the heating apparatus at about six o'clock and had nearly finished working on it when he had heard the sound of footfalls behind him. He had been just about to turn when somebody had rushed at him and struck him on the back of the head, knocking him out. As he had not even glimpsed his attacker he could not possibly give any account of him and, as Sam, Hemmingway and Gervaise himself had all been below decks on various errands between seven and seven-thirty, it might have been any one of them.

Although he would not say so, Gervaise thought that Sam must be the culprit. No one knew better than her father the extraordinary fascination which Lavina exercised over men. Hemmingway, as far as he could see, appeared to be immune from it as, although he was friendly, it was with a detached friendliness and he never went out of his way to amuse or intrigue her. But Derek had been in love with her and she with him three years ago. That Derek was still in love with her Gervaise was quite certain, and his shrewd old eyes had not missed the fact that Sam was perfectly well aware of Derek's passion.

Sam was a very even-tempered man so, at first sight, it hardly seemed likely that he would have made this murderous attack on Derek. But the conditions under which they had been living for the last fortnight were so far outside the normal that they were calculated to upset the balance of any but the most stable brain, and even the fact that they were all living right on top of each other was enough to fray the strongest nerves. If Sam really resented Derek's attention to his wife and had been bottling up his feelings for some days, the sight of them constantly together could easily have driven him to such a state of suppressed fury that, when he had gone below that evening, he might have given way to a sudden temptation and have struck Derek down on the spur of the moment.

The next day Derek was feeling better and as he loathed staying in bed he wanted to get up, but Lavina insisted that, as there was a risk that delayed concussion might set in, he must be good and remain lying down for the day. But she sugared the pill by promising to come and talk to him.

After lunch, when the others were dozing or reading in the lounge, she settled herself in a chair beside his bunk. Having exchanged a few of their usual flippancies, she asked:

'Derek, who'd you really think attacked you? You must have some idea?'

'I don't think. I know,' said Derek angrily, 'it was Hemmingway.'

'But how can you be certain if you didn't see him?'

'Isn't it obvious? He knows I'm in love with you and he's jealous—jealous as hell—because you hardly look at him; whereas you call me "darling" and it's me you turn to whenever you want to dance or play the fool.'

'Oh,' she shrugged, 'that's nothing. We've ragged about together since we were children. What makes you think that he's in love with me, though? He doesn't show any signs of it as far as I can see.'

'No, he doesn't show it. In fact, one would almost think that he dislikes you, at times. But I'll bet he's in love with you, all the same.'

'I haven't even tried to flirt with him; so why should he be?'

'Why not?' Derek demanded. ' "Still waters"—all that sort of thing. How could any man who was shut up with you in this bally tin tub day after day help falling in love with you? It's all I can do to keep my hands off you when you're strutting round showing yourself off. He must have seen that and made up his mind to try and out me first and Sam afterwards in order to get you for himself.'

Lavina shook her head. 'No, Derek, I simply don't believe it; but, as you've raised the matter, you have been rather overdoing things yourself. Sam hasn't said anything because he knows quite well that he can trust me; but he's been awfully grumpy lately and I'm sure it's owing to the way you look at me. You really must try and control yourself a bit more.'

'God knows, I try; but whose fault is it that I get so het up? I've been meaning to talk to you about it as soon as I got a chance. For God's sake stop wandering about the place in swim-suits. It isn't decent and it's calculated to send any man off his rocker.'

'Really! You amaze me. I quite thought the excitement of seeing a girl's legs had gone out with the Gaiety Chorus and opera hats. Do you seriously suggest that I'm less attractive in trousers?'

Derek sighed. 'No. Not really. That's just the trouble. You get me boiled up whatever you're wearing.'

'I'm sorry, my dear; honestly, I don't mean to. It's frightful that you should feel the way you do about me, because I am terribly fond of you, but I do beg you to do your damnedest not to show it quite so plainly; otherwise it may lead to the most blood-some row, and we simply must avoid anything like that.'

'All right,' Derek agreed reluctantly. 'I'll do my best. But, all the same, I'm certain it was on your account that Hemmingway tried to murder me.'

It was not until after breakfast the following morning that Lavina managed to get Hemmingway alone. Knowing the others would be busy for a few moments, she said in a low voice: 'Listen, I want to talk to you.'

'Go ahead,' he murmured.

'That was a queer business about Derek being attacked, and I feel that it's up to any of us who have ideas about it to get to the bottom of the matter so that we can try and prevent anything of the sort happening again. D'you agree?'

'Certainly.'

'All right, then. I know I shouldn't ask you this, but—are you in love with me?'

'No,' said Hemmingway, looking her straight in the eyes.

'That's good,' she nodded. 'I didn't think you were.'

'Why do you ask?'

'Because Derek believes it was you who attacked him; and that you meant to murder him first and Sam afterwards.'

'What utter nonsense! You know how I feel about Sam. Is it likely that I'd . ..'

Lavina held up her hand. 'Derek's theory is that you're in love with me and that you intended to eliminate any possible rivals in order to get me for yourself. On the face of it that may sound fantastic, but men have done queerer things for love, you know.'

His strange eyes held hers and it was only with his mouth that he smiled, before he said: 'Derek is a fool. He's in love with you himself and so jealous of your every glance that he's allowed his imagination to get the better of his common-sense. I give you my word that it was not I who attacked him. As for the rest, I know you think that every man you even sit around with is in love with you, but it just happens that I'm not.'

'All right, I accept that,' replied Lavina gravely. 'But, just in case there was anything in Derek's theory, I thought I ought to let you know that if any "accident" did befall the others I'd shoot anyone I believed to be responsible and, as you may remember, when I do shoot, I shoot to kill!'

Suddenly Hemmingway laughed. 'You're a grand person, Lavina. If you like, I'll lend you my gun.'

Lavina laughed, too. 'Don't bother. I don't think I'll need one; but if I do, I can always borrow Gervaise's.'

The sea remained placid, the clouds showed no signs of breaking, and the Ark drifted onwards among the debris which had floated to the surface from the flooded world. For two days there was no further incident to disturb their dull routine although they all continued to be nervy and suspicious of each other. Derek was up and about again; Oliver's arm was slowly mending. The raids upon the food had ceased, so Ger-: vaise, who had a theory that the thief and Derek's attacker were one and the same, had begun to hope that whoever had been responsible had taken a hold upon themselves through fright at discovering that they had nearly committed a murder, and that he would be faced with no more unsolved mysteries.

It was, therefore, with an appalling shock that, on coming out of his cabin on the fifteenth morning of the flood, he found his brother lying dead on the living-room floor.

Before he could warn the others Margery had come out of the women's cabin. Her piercing scream brought the rest of the party running; and in a horrified group they stood staring at Oliver's dead body. The back of his head had been smashed to pulp. There could be no doubt that he had been murdered.

His face drawn and anxious, Gervaise looked slowly round. 'There is only one explanation for this,' he said huskily, 'and since there is no possibility of any of us leaving the Ark it is a terrible thing to have to face. One of us is a homicidal maniac.'

The Maniac

The full horror of their situation slowly dawned upon them. There was no escape from the Ark. They must remain living cheek by jowl in its narrow confines; yet the brain of one of them had been turned by their terrible experiences and, whoever that person was, while appearing normal for the greater part of the time, he was afflicted with occasional periods of hideous aberration in which he was capable of murder.

With a nervy gesture Gervaise passed a hand over his white hair. 'You see, it all ties up,' he went on gravely. 'I know most of you think it was Lavina who took the cigarettes but I'll swear that she would never lie to me if she had done so while in her senses. The bottle of brandy might have been taken by any of us; or perhaps that twelfth bottle was never there. I believed that it was Derek who had been at the food because he is the heartiest eater among us; but that doesn't explain the fact that much more food has disappeared than any one person could have eaten. Sam, Hemmingway and myself, all had an opportunity to attack Derek and it is plain, to me at least, that the other two had a possible motive; but neither of them had the least reason to kill poor Oliver. These acts are those of a madman and the lives of us all now depend upon finding out which of us suffers from these terrible fits of lunacy.'

Each of them was quite convinced that it was not themselves and regarded the others with reluctant suspicion. It was a frightful thing for them to think that from now onwards, if ever they remained alone for a few minutes with one of the others, that other's mind might suddenly go blank and they would find themselves fighting with a maniac; or that one of their friends might steel upon them in the dark and strike them down, as had happened to Derek and Oliver.

'Well, there are six of us now,' said the practical Sam, voicing the thoughts of them all, 'and the best precaution we can take is that never less than three of us should remain alone together.'

'How about at night?' asked Margery. 'Lavina and I must continue to share a cabin.'

'I don't mind that, if you don't,' Lavina said promptly. 'We'll lock our door, and if I see you walking in your sleep, I shall scream the Ark down.'

Margery shrugged. 'I don't mind, either. It can't be you, because you're not strong enough to have delivered those terrible blows on the back of Uncle Oliver's head.'

'1 don't know so much. They say that maniacs have superhuman strength.'

Sam shook his head. 'No, it isn't either of you girls. The fact that Derek was attacked when he was below rules both of you out. It's one of us men; either Gervaise, Hemmingway or myself.'

Sadly they set about preparing Oliver for burial. Margery washed his body while Lavina sewed up a sheet to be his shroud and weights into its lower end. It was only after they had finished that the relief of tears came; and both girls sobbed as Gervaise read the Burial Service over his brother's body. The door of the Ark was opened and the shrouded figure consigned to the cold, grey waves.

The dreary grey skies still stretched low overhead from horizon to horizon. Although it was only mid-July the temperature was that of November and it seemed to be growing colder day by day. A slight but chill wind was blowing and the waves lapped hungrily at the landing platform of the Ark; the only thing showing above the waters in all that vast desolation.

When the Funeral Service was over and they had again returned, shivering, to the warmth, none of them felt like talking. An uneasy silence brooded over the living-room as they sat about doing nothing or making a pretence of trying to read. The minds of all of them were filled with dark suspicion of their neighbours and horrid, fruitless speculation as to when and upon whom the murderer would make his next attack.

Lunch was a gloomy meal and after it, as had become their habit, they retired to their cabins for an afternoon sleep.

It was about half-past three when Derek, waking from a doze, noticed that Hemmingway was no longer in the bunk opposite him. Instantly he roused Gervaise and Sam and, slipping from his bunk, muttered quickly:

'It's Hemmingway. I felt sure it was. Look! His bunk's empty. He must have tiptoed out of the cabin while we were asleep. Come on! Arm yourselves with anything that's handy; we'll probably have to knock him out.'

At that moment there was a muffled shriek. Gervaise wrenched a sheet out of his bunk to tie the maniac, Sam grabbed a clothes-brush for a club, and Derek a heavy ruler which still lay where Oliver had left it by the side of his now empty bunk.

As they dashed out of the cabin the screams came again. For a moment they had assumed that one of the girls was the new victim; but in the tiny hallway they ran full-tilt into them, for they also had been roused and were leaving their cabin to find out who was screaming.

The trap-door in the living-room, which led to the lower deck, was open. Rushing towards it, Sam cried:

'He's down there! The poor chap must know he's the maniac and be trying to commit suicide—or else he's got caught up in the machinery.'

In his anxiety to save his friend from further injury Sam dropped the twelve feet to the lower deck straight through the trap. Derek and Gervaise followed by the ladder. A yell of 'Help! Help!' came from a storeroom where the seeds and bulbs were kept.

Picking himself up Sam sprang through the open doorway, the others hard on his heels. In the dimmish light of the single electric globe they saw that a desperate struggle was in progress. Rolling on the floor Hemmingway was at death-grips with another man.

The other three flung themselves upon the struggling couple and succeeded in wrenching Hemmingway's attacker away from him. Their opponent fought with all the strength of a madman, but between them they managed to pinion his arms and feet and roll him over on his back. As the light struck his face Sam gasped:

'Good God! It'sFinkie!'

Fink-Drummond's chin was covered with a fortnight's beard, his hair was matted, his clothes indescribably dirty. He was slavering at the mouth and his eyes shone with a maniacal hatred. Few of his old colleagues would have recognised the ex-Cabinet Minister but Sam had known him, after a moment, by his long, pointed nose.

Having bound their captive with the sheet that Gervaise had brought from his bunk, they hoisted him up to the living-room and sat him down in a chair. Out of pity for his state Lavina brought him a glass of water to drink but, with a violent jerk of his head, he knocked it out of her hand. All their efforts to make him speak were quite unavailing. He was stark, staring mad.

Gervaise went below to investigate and, returning after a few moments, said to the others:

'I think he must have been still sane when he came on board, because he chose for his hiding place the one storeroom that none of us were likely to go into until the Ark touched land. By rearranging a lot of the cases of seeds and bulbs he'd hollowed out a six-foot tunnel and in it, I'm glad to say, I found most of the missing food. I imagine he took as much as he could each time because he was afraid we might make some new arrangement of the stores so that he wouldn't be able to get at them again later on.'

'But how on earth did he get aboard in the first place?' Sam inquired.

'Roy,' said Margery. 'Roy used to sit with him when he was a prisoner at Stapleton, if you remember, and they became quite friendly. Roy must have told him about the Ark and. after he was free, he must have decided that he'd stand a better chance of saving himself by stowing away on board it than by any other means. It would have been quite easy for him to have got into it and made his arrangements on the night Roy went to London, while we were all asleep in the house.'

'That's about it,' Derek agreed. 'And during that terrible time we had those first few days, being cooped up there in the dark while the Ark was thrown all over the place must have sent him mad. God knows, it was bad enough for us; but just think what the poor devil must have suffered with all those cases sliding about or being flung on top of him in the darkness. Light as most of them are, it's a miracle they didn't kill him. But how did you find him, Hemmingway?'

Hemmingway smiled. 'I've read quite a lot about insanity at one time and another and I felt fairly certain that none of us was mad; the only other explanation was a stowaway. I remembered then that whenever I've passed the seed room lately there's been a very unpleasant smell. I thought some of the roots in there were going bad, but after lunch today it occurred to me that it might be something else. As my idea seemed a bit far-fetched, 1 didn't like to tell the rest of you about it in case you thought that I might be the madman myself, so when you were all asleep I took my loaded crop and went down to investigate. But Finkie was on me before I could get a blow in and he was near murdering me by the time you chaps came on the scene.'

Gervaise nodded his grey head. 'Well, I do congratulate you. Having found him explains everything and relieves all our minds of an intolerable burden. It was plucky of you, too, to risk taking on a madman on your own.'

'What're you going to do with him?' Lavina asked, staring nervously at the wild-eyed figure in the chair.

'We can't leave him loose about the Ark,' said Gervaise, decisively. 'We'll shift the cases round a bit to make things more comfortable, keep his hands tied so that he can't attack whoever brings him his food, and put him back where he came from.'

Fink-Drummond was held while Gervaise gave him a morphia injection; they then rearranged the stores and, when he had gone off, they carried him down to his prison. Having put looped cords over his head, hands and ankles, they knotted these behind his back so that he could sit or lie in reasonable comfort but could not free himself and would choke if he attempted any violent movements. There was a risk that in a frenzy he might strangle himself while they were all up in the living-room or asleep in their bunks but that risk had to be taken as there was no other way in which they could ensure his not attacking whoever acted as his gaoler. They eliminated the chance as far as possible by padding the cord that went round his neck, and made up a bed for him with the mattress and bed-clothes from the spare bunk in the men's cabin that Roy was to have occupied.

After the discovery of the maniac-stowaway life in the Ark became normal. Day after day it tossed or drifted on the bosom of the grim, uncharted seas, first in one direction then in another. Gervaise was now convinced that they must be somewhere out in the North Atlantic. The ever-increasing cold was a clear indication that they were being swept a long way north, while had they been floating over the old countries within a few hundred miles of Stapleton it was almost certain that they would by this time have sighted some of the European mountain chains; the tops of which must still be above water.

All of them were now used to the constant rocking of the sphere, but at times a strong wind got up upon which the waves set the Ark rolling and lurching most uncomfortably; and for two days in the latter part of July they suffered again the terrors of another storm.

Margery and Sam had renewed bouts of sea-sickness whenever the weather was rough, and partly on account of the fact that they shared the same distressing weakness a strong sympathy developed between them; but other things also contributed to their cordial friendship. Margery was a serious-minded person and had always admired Sam for his sense of responsibility and decisive, straight-thinking mind; while, from having at first been sorry for her as Lavina's less lovely sister, he came to realise that she had many sterling qualities that Lavina lacked.

All of them had now begun to worry in secret as to whether they would ever see land again. With the rediscovery of the bulk of the food that Finkie had stolen they still had ample provisions for some weeks, but the flood had proved so much vaster in its extent than even Oliver's most gloomy forebodings had led them to expect, that horrid doubts as to if they would survive had returned to nag their minds and they now feared that they might be washed up and down the Atlantic until they died of starvation.

Margery, quite naturally, took refuge from her fears in the consolations of her stereotyped religion; frequently reading her Bible and the numerous sacred works which the library of the Ark contained. The others were not irreligious but thought of spiritual things in a somewhat different way. Only Sam. who was fundamentally a Christian but had neglected his religion for many years, observed the great comfort that Margery derived from her faith and began to join her in discussions which drew them still more closely together.

At times Lavina still plumped herself down on Sam's lap, gave him quick kisses and played with his greying hair. But Sir Samuel Curry, millionaire, with his host of friends and hangers-on, was one thing; the middle-aged, kind but somewhat ponderous man in the Ark, rather another. He seemed to have lost his sense of humour and the lightness of touch which was so essential in dealing with the moods of a flame-like creature like herself. She never questioned the fact that she still loved him but there were times when he bored her to distraction, and she began to rely more and more for her entertainment on Derek and Hemmingway.

Derek was much the more satisfactory in that respect as he never seemed to have anything on hand to occupy his attention for any length of time and so was always at her beck and call. It was Derek who turned on her bath in the morning; Derek who fetched her cigarettes when she had left them a few yards away in her cabin; Derek who, after every meal, brought her handbag from the table to the arm-chair which she had chosen to decorate with her graceful limbs; and Derek who changed the records on the gramophone according to her instructions whenever it was played.

Besides, Derek was really very nice to look at. His handsome face had lost none of its bronze during their month of drifting on the bleak, cold seas. His crisp, brown hair was good to touch and in fooling with him she often ruffled it. True, he had few subjects outside huntin', shootin', fishin' and farmin' upon which he could discourse intelligently, but he was a ready listener, his hearty laugh was a certain echo to every sally that she made and he jumped at the chance of dancing with her whenever she told him to clear the rugs at one end of the living-room.

Hemmingway, on the other hand, had many interests of his own. He read a great deal, often played chess with Gervaise or six-pack Bezique with Sam, and sometimes he did not even glance in Lavina's direction for hours at a stretch. When he did he was friendly enough and he was always willing to discuss the development of her film scenario with her when he was not otherwise occupied.

His behaviour puzzled her extremely. During their first few days in the Ark she had been quite convinced that he had fallen for her but was keeping a tight hold on himself through loyalty to Sam and from a desire not to take advantage of the experience they had been through together during their flight from London. Yet when she had frankly challenged him, after Derek had been knocked out, he had categorically denied having any feeling other than friendship for her and as the days wore on she had become convinced that he had been speaking the truth.

Whether she was glad or sorry about that she was unable to make up her mind. She was quite sure that she was not in love with him and she had all her work cut out to handle Derek, so she was really rather glad that Hemmingway was not likely to provide a further complication in her relations with Sam. But at the same time it was a sad blow to her vanity that Hemmingway should remain immune from her fascination.

She made no attempt to attract him but she felt that the mere fact of her constant presence should have been enough; and she could never resist the temptation to watch him covertly whenever he was reading to see if he was watching her. But he always appeared to be completely absorbed in whatever he was doing and after a time she became conscious of a queer reaction in her feelings for him. From having considered him, when they had first really got to know each other, as rather a charming and amusing person she reverted to her first opinion that he was a cold, monkish intellectual; and by the time they had been in the Ark a month she was thinking of him as dispassionately as she did of Gervaise or her sister.

Gervaise had taken over Oliver's job with the instruments as well as carrying on with his own work of writing up the journal of the Ark and issuing the stores. But there had still been no opportunity to use the sextant and take the altitude of the sun, moon or stars, as day after day, night after night, the dense banks of low cloud remained unbroken overhead.

The general level of their spirits sank as the days dragged by.

Whenever the weather was too rough for Derek to get his morning exercise he became grumpy with everyone except Lavina. She turned on the gramophone so frequently that they were almost tortured by the incessant repetition of her favourite dance tunes. Margery discovered that Sam had never been confirmed and was taking him stage by stage through the catechism.

On July 24th Gervaise called a conference. Over half their edible supplies had been consumed and he suggested that they should make a reduction in their daily rations. They agreed unanimously, but the fact that they had to do so sounded a warning note. Their nerves deteriorated and, under the constant strain of watching for the land which never appeared above the grey horizons, they began to be terse with each other and apt to have high words over trifles. Only Gervaise remained calm and secure in his spiritual fastness, the outcome of a lifetime's study of the great philosophies, and ever ready to restore good feeling between the others with a well chosen word.

Sam, Derek, and Hemmingway took it in turns to look after their mad prisoner. On the day following his capture they brought him up and gave him a very badly needed bath, after which they fitted him out in a suit from one of the bags that Roy had never reached the Ark to claim. He had occasional screaming fits when he would throw himself about, but otherwise gave no trouble, as Gervaise kept him on a low diet and mixed sedatives with his food. With the welding implements, which were among the large collection of such things that had been stored in the Ark, Derek succeeded in forging the ends of a length of chain into two anklets, so that they were able to hobble Fink-Drummond and release him from his other bonds; after which he was able to move freely about his narrow prison but unable to separate his feet more than twelve inches, which rendered him incapable of exerting his full strength in any attack. He made no attempt to escatpe, however, but became increasingly lethargic rather like a wild beast that has been doped, as he remained obdurately silent although on many occasions they tried to persuade him to talk.

In the latter days of July they had several severe hail-storms during which bits of ice as big as pigeon's eggs drummed on the outer sphere of the Ark like bullets, making a deafening but harmless din, and on the first of August they saw their first snow.

For thirty hours the fast-falling flakes blotted out the monotonous seascape, but when the snow ceased on the second day they were overjoyed to see that at long last the clouds had broken, revealing the sun. For over five weeks it had remained hidden by the dense clouds which had accumulated as a result of the deluge.

Gervaise quickly got out Oliver's sextant and took an observation; a very simple matter as it consists only of bringing an image of the sun in a mirror to a point on the sextant's arc where the rim of the image just touches the rim of the sun itself seen through a smoked glass. Hemmingway, meanwhile, stood by to take the time on the chronometers which, although probably inaccurate now from the buffeting the Ark had received, could not be far out as they had never stopped.

The two of them then worked out the easy sum which gave the Ark's latitude, and it proved to be 71° 17' north.

Finding their longitude was a different matter, as neither of them knew more than the rudiments of nautical astronomy, but they hoped that they would be able to do so if they could get observations of some of the stars.

The discovery that they had drifted so far north was extremely perturbing as, following the 70th parallel of north latitude on the map, they saw that it ran from Baffin Land, across the middle of Greenland, past the North Cape, and through the Arctic Ocean to Siberia.

Gervaise and Hemmingway both felt convinced that their calculation had been correct but hoped, as did the whole party, that it had been wrong. Even if they sighted land now it looked as if they would be faced with the grim prospect of fending for themselves in some desolate region of the Arctic.

Yet the weather seemed to confirm the reckoning, as they had more snow and sleet in the days that followed, and when the sun broke through again for a brief period on the 5th of August further observations gave their latitude as 71° 20' N., which established the fact that they were still drifting in a northerly direction.

It was on the 7th of August that Sam, going into the kitchen first thing in the morning to help prepare breakfast, found

Margery lying there motionless, face downwards on the floor.

His first thought was that Fink-Drummond had escaped during the night and was responsible for this new outrage. His second, that she was dead and that he had lost her. Only then did he realise how much her companionship had meant to him through all these desperate weeks.

It was not that he no longer loved Lavina; her grace and beauty still played havoc with his senses, but her youthful vitality, her insistence that they must always be doing something even though they were shut up in the narrow confines of the Ark, and her insatiable craving for amusement had proved a great strain on him lately, in spite of the fact that Derek and Hemmingway occupied a good part of her time.

Sam was a strong man, but from his first youthful struggles in Bradford he had worked himself unmercifully and he was now getting on for fifty. He had been young for his age when he went on his honeymoon with Lavina but the strain of the last seven weeks had told upon him and he now looked, and felt, even older than his years. The holocaust which had swept all his worldly possessions away had revived something primitive in him. Gone was the veneer which had so long overlaid his simple inbred habits. Even his voice had changed, the vowels broadening as he reverted to his childhood tongue.

He wanted a peace and repose that Lavina could never give him, but that Margery could. Lavina's finer qualities, her courage, her independence, her sense of fair play and her real integrity were so masked by her apparent irresponsibility that Sam was only faintly conscious of them, whereas Margery's straightforwardness, thoughtfulness for others and unselfishness had stood out all the more by comparison because she lacked the glamour of her younger sister.

As the mistress of his great house in St. James's Square Lavina could have been unsurpassable, but Margery would have made a real home for her man and her children anywhere; and now that money, position and power had all been swept away from him, Sam knew that he would never miss them in the least if the future held a simple home for him like that which he had known with his mother in Bradford.

While these thoughts raced through his brain, Margery stirred. In an instant he was on his knees beside her and had taken her in his arms. Her eyes opened; his heart began to hammer in his chest. Before he knew what he was doing he was kissing her feverishly and pressing her to him.

'Sam—oh, Sam,' she murmured, leaning her cheek against his. Then, as realisation dawned upon her, she pushed him back, exclaiming. 'Oh, what are you doing? We're mad! You mustn't, Sam!'

'I—I couldn't help it—in my relief at finding you weren't dead' he stammered. 'I love you, Margery. I love you.'

'So that—is that,' said a quiet voice from the doorway, and, swinging round, Sam saw Lavina standing there, a cigarette dangling from her lips.

Domestic Upheaval

'Margery fainted and I—I . . Sam stuttered, coming slowly to his feet.

'No need to explain,' said Lavina, with dangerous quietness. 'I understand the situation perfectly,' and, swinging on her heel, she slammed the door.

'Oh, God!' groaned Sam, 'what a hellish mess! I'm sorry, Margery—most terribly sorry—to have let you in for this.'

But Margery was smiling. It was her hour, her triumph, her vindication as a woman. She had loved Sam from the moment that he had kissed her in the cloakroom at Stapleton on his wedding-day. His strength, his kindness and his uprightness of purpose made him all that she had ever wanted in a man. She had not consciously gone out to get him because he was her sister's husband, and her code forbade that; but all her scruples had gone overboard the moment she had come round to find herself in his arms. Morality was man-made; she was woman, aching to be loved. And, joy piled on joy, after Lavina had casually taken every man that had come into their ken, the final victory lay with her, for she, without even scheming to do so, had taken Lavina's own husband.

With an enormous effort of will she forced herself not to show the incredible happiness she was feeling. Sam must be played quietly now. He would become remorseful and she would lose him if she followed her burning impulse to fling her arms round his neck.

'It's all right, Sam,' she said, as she scrambled to her feet. 'If you feel that way you couldn't have helped it; so you're not to blame. I would have done just the same if I had found you lying on the floor and thought you were dead.'

'You would?' he exclaimed, seizing one of her hands.

She quickly withdrew it. 'Of course. You can never know what our friendship has meant to me. I haven't had a very happy life and when you walked into it you were Lavina's fiance. I know I ought to have forced myself not to think of you but I simply couldn't help doing that. Perhaps we poor women are made weak with a purpose. But it wouldn't have been right for me to show you that I loved you.'

'Oh, Margery—Margery!' He passed a hand over his eyes. 'I'm not worthy. This is a terrible thing that I've done.'

'No, Sam. A Providence that sees into all our hearts willed that we should at least have the joy of knowing of each other's love.' Margery was playing her part superbly and she knew it. All the old cliches rolled automatically off her tongue and she could see that for Sam they were the words of the perfect woman. She wondered if she dared risk saying, 'We must forget this—never, never think of it again,' but decided that she had better not chance it. Sam might take her at her word, and that was the last thing she wanted. Instead, she went on: 'We have our duty; we must think of others, not of ourselves. I leave myself in your hands, Sam dear, knowing that whatever you decide will be right.'

Sam hardly knew what to reply to this. Margery was perfectly right, of course. They must think of Lavina, not of themselves. They must not let their guilty passions blind them to their sense of duty. How like her it was to voice those high ideals. The fact that during his long bachelorhood Sam had from time to time kept numerous young women in very comfortable flats did not stand him in any stead now. They had been invariably beautiful and usually empty-headed little gold-diggers without any moral principles, but they had served the purpose of providing him with light recreation during the few hours of leisure he was able to snatch from his preoccupation with big business. Now, for the first time in his life, he was up against something totally different; a woman with ideals, a good woman such as his mother had been; and he felt the enormous responsibility that the declaration of her love had laid upon him. But. for the life of him, he could not see what decision could be taken.

There had been no misconduct. Such a thing was almost unthinkable in connection with Margery. So, in a normal world, Lavina would have had no grounds for divorce, but matters might have been arranged so that he could have persuaded her to give him his freedom; whereas here, in the Ark, how could he possibly even suggest casting off his young wife with a view to marrying her elder sister? In any case, there was no one to divorce or remarry him, unless the father of the two girls could be considered to have special powers as Captain of the Ark; and the fact of Gervaise being with them seemed to make the position even more impossible. Yet Margery obviously expected him to do something about it.

After a moment, the habit of years reasserted itself and, using the same technique as that which he had applied on innumerable occasions when difficult problems had arisen at board meetings, he said firmly:

'Leave this to me. We mustn't hurry things. But after a little thought I'm sure I shall find a way.'

Margery was equally puzzled as to what step could next be taken, but that, she thought, was Sam's affair and, in the meantime, he had definitely committed himself which was all that really mattered.

'Of course we mustn't rush things,' she agreed. 'I'm perfectly content to wait. Your love will give me the strength and courage to do that.'

Sam knew that he would have to do some pretty hectic thinking and had just decided that he would take refuge at once in one of the storerooms so as to be by himself when he suddenly recalled the state in which he had found Margery ten minutes earlier. Turning at the door, he said:

'By Jove! I'd entirely forgotten to ask what happened to you. I thought Finkie must have escaped and attacked you; but it seems you'd only fainted. Whatever caused you to do that?'

Margery's mouth dropped open and her eyes almost popped with excitement. 'Of course, I haven't told you,' she cried, grabbing him by the arm. 'When I came in here to make breakfast I looked out of the port-hole and I saw land, Sam. Land! * 'Good God!' In two strides Sam was across the kitchen staring eagerly out of the port; and there, no more than five miles distant, was that for which they had watched in vain through so many dreary weeks.

'The sight of land after all this time came as such a shock to me that I fainted,' Margery murmured.

'Yes, yes,' Sam breathed, gazing enraptured at the low, green shore. 'But come on! We must tell the others.'

Running from the kitchen with excited shouts they broke the news to the rest of the party. The land was not visible from the port-holes of the living-room so they crowded about those in the cabins on the other side of the Ark; all of them wildly thrilled by this new hope of release from their prison and a real chance, at last, that they might live out their lives to their allotted span instead of slowly starving to death on the empty ocean.

They had naturally anticipated that when they did sight land it would be the top of a mountain chain; some snowy peaks and a jagged, rocky shore; but this was totally different. Before them in the distance spread a low, greenish landscape of trees and meadows splashed here and there with white patches which they knew must be half-melted snow.

Gervaise and Hemmingway had dashed into the men's cabin and, after a moment, Gervaise remarked:

'It's surprising that we didn't see it when we were dressing.'

'I don't think so,' Hemmingway replied. 'It's quite a long time now since we used to look out hopefully each morning. Anyhow, we'd better not waste any time in getting the engines going, otherwise a storm might get up and blow us away from it again.'

'You're right,' Gervaise agreed, and leaving the cabin he called to Derek, who, as their Engineer, hurried below at once.

They were by now so used to the silence of the Ark and its gentle rolling, that it was a queer sensation to hear the pulse of its engines and feel it chugging slowly forward in a given direction. Fortunately the weather was calm, so, in spite of its unwieldy shape, its big drop-keel and rudder kept it from revolving, and although its pace was less than that of a rowing-boat it made steady progress towards the shore. While it was slowly forging ahead Sam and Hemmingway got up from the stores the parts of a collapsible canvas boat, which they unpacked and assembled. An hour and a half after the engines had been got going the Ark jolted slightly as its keel cut into earth, and came to rest in shallow water about fifty yards from land.

Opening the door, they went out on to the platform to survey this domain that the gods had decreed for them. On closer inspection it was by no means so attractive. A great number of its trees had been uprooted and broken branches dangled from the others giving them a pathetic, woebegone appearance. In some places the grass was mired by great patches of mud or snow, a dead horse lay on the foreshore, and for as far as they could see, the land was sprinkled with the debris of the flood.

It was bitterly cold upon the platform after the warmth of the Ark, so, having seen Sam and Hemmingway launch their canvas boat and set off in it to row ashore for a brief exploration, the others hurried inside again.

By lunch time the explorers were back to report that they had been unable to penetrate inland more than a few hundred yards in any direction. The whole earth was so sodden that they had got bogged wherever they went. They had seen a small, square, grey stone house in the distance and come across some drowned cattle but had discovered no indication as to what country they might be in.

'We may be in northern Norway, Iceland or Greenland,' said Gervaise sadly, 'but it's impossible to say which.'

'I'm quite sure it's not Norway,' Hemmingway volunteered. 'This is low meadow-country, not unlike England, and if we were in Norway we should certainly be able to see mountains in the distance.'

'True,' Gervaise agreed. 'For the same reason I doubt if we are in Greenland, unless we've landed somewhere on the high table-land of its interior. I should think Iceland is the most probable; but, of course, we may have drifted very much farther than we thought, either west to Canada or east into Northern Russia.'

'But the country doesn't look like that,' Lavina objected. 'It's too green and friendly.'

Gervaise smiled. 'It's a big mistake to imagine that countries bordering on the Arctic are always lands of snow, dearest. The most beautiful wild flowers in the world grow in the meadows of Siberia and it's greener there during the short Arctic summers than it is in England. Now that it's August their winter is approaching and soon they will be buried deep in snow; but we're seeing one of them just before the long Arctic night sets in.'

'It is neither Canada nor Russia,' Hemmingway said decisively, 'otherwise the trees would be mostly larch and pine. Besides, the country is too much cut up into small fields. I should say the betting is a hundred to one on our having fetched up in Iceland.'

'Anyhow, there's one comfort,' Sam added. 'The flood is definitely subsiding. This is typical low, wooded country so we can't be very far above sea-level and everything is so drenched that it's quite obvious that the whole of this area was still under water not more than two or three days ago. There are no snow patches within five hundred yards of the shore either, which indicates that the water must have gone down that much since the early hours of the morning.'

That Sam was right about the flood subsiding was evidenced an hour later. Unnoticed by them the waters had seeped away from under the landing-platform, but they realised it only when the Ark gave a sudden lurch, flinging everything off the table and most of them to the floor. Its keel, stuck deep in the mud, had kept them upright since the sphere had grounded, but with the lessening support of the waters it had given way. They were floating again now, with the deck at a sharp angle.

Picking themselves up, Derek and Gervaise scrambled down to the engine-room, and operating the levers, drew in the keel and rudder; upon which the Ark righted itself, bobbing gently.

'We'd best tow her in as far as possible,' Hemmingway suggested. 'Then, as we lost our anchors, we'll throw out some kedges made of weighty objects we've got among the stores.'

Having fixed a tow-rope, Sam and Hemmingway got into the collapsible boat again and laboured manfully for half an hour to bring the sphere nearer to land. They got it to within ten feet of the shore-line, where it grounded again, but kedge-anchors were found to be unnecessary as the water was going down with the quickness of an outgoing tide.

When Hemmingway and Sam came aboard again their hands were blue with cold and they were both shivering. By four o'clock it had started to snow, blotting out most of the landscape, and the big white flakes continued to fall softly and persistently until darkness hid them from view.

The joy of finding land again was marred for Sam by his domestic contretemps. The scene in which he had participated early that morning had never since been absent from his mind. Margery seemed normal, and even cheerful, while Lavina gave no indication that anything unusual had occurred. But Sam was so nervy that he could not sit still happily for five minutes together. In an agony of suspense he waited for bedtime, wondering if Lavina would give him her usual good-night kiss.

His torture was prolonged by the fact that they stayed up much later than usual as Gervaise had brought up some bottles of wine and spirits to celebrate their having survived the flood, and for a couple of hours after dinner they speculated uselessly but garrulously as to what the future might hold in store for them.

At last Lavina said, 'Well, it's been an exciting day but I'm going to bed,' and stood up.

The others followed her example and Sam watched on tenter-hooks to see what she would do. She kissed her father, smiled round at the others and, apparently forgetting him, went towards her cabin.

'Lavina,' he called after her, with a tremor in his voice, 'if you don't mind, I'd like a word with you before you turn in.'

'Right you are,' she answered, without turning her head. 'I'll come back again in my dressing-gown.'

It was Lavina's habit to take a long time preparing herself for bed. Sam had never quite discovered why it was necessary for her to sit so long in front of her mirror after she had brushed her hair, but she never spent less than three-quarters of an hour tinkering with her face. Tonight she deliberately took nearly double that time, then strolled out of her cabin with a cigarette dangling from her newly carmined lips. The others had all retired, so husband and wife had the living-room to themselves.

'Well?' said Lavina, sitting down in an armchair and crossing her well-formed legs.

Now that the moment had come, Sam's nervousness had disappeared. He went into action just as he would have done if faced with any other tricky situation.

'About this morning,' he began. 'You saw me kissing Margery. First of all, I'd like to assure you that there's been nothing else between us. We haven't been having any private sessions below deck of the kind you and I used to have during our first weeks in the Ark, or anything of that sort.'

Lavina smiled. 'Knowing Margery, I didn't suppose for one moment that you had. She's in love with you, of course; has been for a long time. Any woman could see that. But Margery's the sort who would demand marriage before she went to bed, and I can hardly see her playing slap-and-tickle with you among the packing-cases. Are you in love with her?'

'Yes.'

'Then you're not in love with me any longer?'

'I wouldn't exactly say that.'

'Hell! You can't have it both ways.'

'I didn't say I could, but it's quite possible to be in love with two people at the same time.'

'It all depends on what you call love.'

'I mean that I love you both in different ways.'

'What you mean, Sam, is that you don't love me any longer but you still desire me; whereas you do love Margery—for her worthiness, and all that. But you've no particular desire to sleep with her.'

'On the contrary. I think one thing goes with the other; anyhow, for a man like myself. And most people would consider Margery darned good-looking if you didn't happen to be about.'

'Yes, she's only twenty-six, and decidedly attractive in a saintly sort of way. I suppose what's got you down is that you've been a casual bad-hat all your life but never before run into a good-looking woman who goes about clad in woollens and a halo. But that's beside the point. What I imagine you're trying to tell me is that if we were living in a normal way you'd ask me to divorce you so that you could marry her.'

'Oh, God!' Sam groaned. 'This is simply frightful. We've only been married ourselves just under three months.'

'I know. But having been cooped up for so long in this thing, where we haven't been out of each other's sight except when asleep, has made all the difference, and that has come practically on top of our five weeks' honeymoon when we hardly saw a soul. We've spent more hours together since our marriage than most married people do in a couple of years. Besides, life in the Ark is so totally unlike the sort of life we'd be living if the comet had never appeared. This sort of existence has brought out all my very worst points. I'm lazy, thoughtless, unpractical, and very easily get bored; whereas Margery, being the perfect hausfrau, has had a marvellous opportunity to do her stuff. Naturally, by comparison, she appears as a shining example of what a good woman should be. I'm not a good woman, Sam, and I've never pretended to be, but I would never willingly have let you down.'

Sam knew that every word she spoke was true, and he marvelled at the cold logic with which she summed up the situation. 'It's my fault entirely,' he admitted unhappily. 'You've got qualities that Margery hasn't, but you've had little chance to show them in the last few weeks; whereas she's had all the opportunities she could possibly wish for to show hers. That doesn't excuse me, I know, but it is a fact; and I'm desperately worried as to what to do about the future. You see, I want to be fair to both of you, but I don't see how it's possible.'

Lavina smiled a little bitterly. 'As far as I can see, the future isn't going to be very different from the past few weeks. The whole world has been drowned; so there's no prospect of our getting anywhere, and very little of our meeting any other people. We'll have to pig it in some collection of ruins, I suppose, and I shall be no more use to anybody than I am now. But Margery could run a derelict cottage for you perfectly, cook your meals, clean your house, put your slippers by the fire to warm, and all the rest of it; while you cultivated a bit of land with some of the seeds and things we've got. Besides, she could give you children, and you'd like children— wouldn't you, Sam,'

'Yes,' he nodded.

'Well, I'm not playing. I might have, if I could have had a Harley Street gynaecologist to look after me and all the usual comforts; but I'm damned if I'm going to have a baby like a peasant girl in a cow-shed, and work myself to death bringing the brat up.'

'No. I shouldn't ask you to. You weren't made for that sort of thing; nor, for that matter, to slave in any workaday world. You were born to be served, and to reward men for their service only with your beauty. Where you're unfortunate is that, our civilisation having gone down the drain, it looks as if we'll have to live out the rest of our lives in primitive conditions; and in primitive societies there is not much call for idle women however decorative they may be. But what do you suggest?'

'Well, as it happens, Sam, I'm rather fond of you and, as I am your wife, I have first claim to your protection and support in this lousy dead world that is all that's left to us. You took me on knowing my qualities and I'm still good entertainment. I suppose you agree that by all the laws of God and man, and all the decencies, it's still up to you to fend for me even if I refuse to do a hand's turn?'

'Yes, I quite agree about that.'

'Then I think we'd better leave things for a month. During that time I can make up my mind as to whether I want to keep you; and, since you say you do still love me, you'll have a chance to decide if that's really true. You'll be able to say definitely by then if Margery's good-womanishness and Victorian morality are quite enough compensation for all you'd lose if you lost me.'

'That's very sound,' Sam agreed, 'and damned decent of you. I think you've behaved frightfully well about this and I'm more grateful than I can say; but then, you never were a mean-spirited person. I don't think you've ever done a mean thing in your life.'

'Thanks,' said Lavina calmly, standing up. 'Anyhow, we know where we are now and I'll let you know my decision on the 7th of September. In the meantime, though, I shall consider myself perfectly free to amuse myself, if I wish, with Derek—or Hemmingway.'

She had already turned her back as she uttered the last words, and before Sam could say anything further, she had closed her cabin door behind her.

Calamity

As Sam moved over to the table to mix himself a drink, he was thinking that Lavina had really behaved very fairly. The interview that he had been dreading so much all day was over and there had been no fireworks or bitter recriminations. But then, he had been unjust to Lavina in even thinking that there might be. In any emotional crisis she could always be counted upon to preserve her dignity, which was one of the reasons why her father referred to her as The Princess.

How damnably attractive she looked, Sam thought, in that old dressing-gown she had dug out before leaving Stapleton Court. He had long ago decided, in fact, that she was even more bewitching in the oddest garments than when wearing the most expensive clothes; with the exception, perhaps, of evening dress, in which she became breath-takingly lovely.

He dismissed her mention of Hemmingway without a second thought but her statement that she would consider herself free to amuse herself with Derek gave him much food for uneasy speculation. Although he had always tried to regard their casual intimacy as the natural outcome of a very old friendship he had never liked it, and now, here was Lavina threatening to 'amuse' herself with Derek. What sort of amusement could Lavina have in mind in which she did not already indulge with her good-looking friend? Too late, Sam saw that, owing to his own action, he had put himself in a situation in which he could no longer complain about their friendship. Margery, of course, was a wonderful woman but Lavina had a lot of things that no other woman he'd ever met had got, and he had not yet entirely lost her. By the time he went to bed the wretched Sam was as miserable as he had been an hour earlier, and hopelessly undecided as to which of the two sisters he wanted to have as his constant companion for the rest of his life.

When morning came the snow was still falling, the sphere was high and dry and the edge of the flood had receded a mile or more southwards. The whole landscape was now a wintry scene of ice and snow.

The change in the weather provided them with one advantage: they would no longer have to plod about in ankle-deep mud as Sam and Hemmingway had had to on the previous day. The land was now frozen, so after breakfast, having wrapped themselves in their warmest garments, the whole party were able to walk across it with comparative ease as they set out to explore the surrounding country.

On the other hand the snow limited their range of vision, and although they spent the whole morning trying to find the grey stone house that had been sighted on the previous day, they were unable to locate it. By midday they had decided to give up the search and turned back along their tracks in the snow towards the Ark.

It seemed, however, that in their attempts to find the house they had covered more country than they remembered. The tracks meandered all over the place and gradually became fainter until, after half an hour's walk, they gave out altogether, having become filled up with fresh snow. This placed them in an extremely serious predicament as it meant that if they could not find the Ark they would have to remain out all night. Their only indication of the Ark's direction was that it must lie on lower ground, so they trudged down a slope hoping eventually to come to the water, which would give them the line of the shore. But the slope ended in a valley-bottom which rose to a steeper hillside, so, now silent and anxious, they turned back and tried the other way.

Lavina, who loathed the cold, was feeling absolutely desperate and cursed herself for having allowed her curiosity to overcome her reluctance to accompany the others on the expedition. But she knew no good purpose could be served by worrying the men, who were doing their best to find the way, so she said nothing. It was Margery who began to complain and irritated the others by nagging at them until Gervaise abruptly told her that she would do better to save her strength for further walking than to dissipate it in pointless criticisms.

For three hours they wandered, first in one direction and then in another, their spirits sinking lower and lower, until at last Hemmingway stumbled over the dead horse. They knew from its colour and position that it was the one which they had seen on first landing, so the Ark could not be very far away. While the rest remained near the horse, Derek set off at a brisk walk down the gentle gradient and kept in touch with the others by yodelling to them every few minutes. His first cast took him too far to the right; but when he felt that he must have passed his objective he turned back and began to move in a constantly increasing spiral, until he eventually came upon the giant snowball that the sphere had become in their absence. He then returned to the others and led them in along his last tracks.

It was past four in the afternoon when they wearily dragged themselves up to the door of the Ark, and as they had left it at nine o'clock in the morning they had been out in the snow for over seven hours, walking nearly the whole time; and for four of those hours they had been lost. In consequence they were frozen to the marrow, ill-tempered and thoroughly tired out. It was not until they had drunk some hot tea laced with rum that any return of cheerfulness manifested itself among them and they all agreed that never again would they leave the Ark during a snow-storm.

Even the tea and rum failed to warm Lavina. She sat shivering in a chair, her small face pinched and miserable until Derek, who thought of little else but her well-being, suggested that he should get her some hot bottles and that she should go to bed.

She thanked him with a pale smile and agreed that would be best; but she had a bad night and was feverish when she woke the following morning, having caught a nasty chill.

Gervaise doctored her and said that she had better stay in bed until she felt all right again, so she did not get up for the next three days; but she did not miss anything by remaining in her cabin as the snow continued to fall without interruption and the others did not leave the Ark except to stretch their limbs in its immediate vicinity.

The fact that they were now able to get away from each other by going outside their steel home enabled Sam and Margery to have some long talks while walking up and down in the snow. Sam reported the conversation he had had with Lavina and Margery derived much secret satisfaction from the way things had gone. She was surprised and pleased that Lavina had made so little trouble but gave her sister little credit for the fact that it was her direct mind and generosity which really formed the basis of the agreement.

In Margery's eyes, Sam had done the right and manly thing in tackling Lavina without delay, and she felt sure that it must have been Sam's own firmness which had carried the tricky interview through to a successful conclusion. The very fact that Sam insisted on giving Lavina full marks only made Margery admire him the more for his strength and modesty, and she felt that her sister, although impetuous and self-willed, must be a weak creature underneath to have surrendered her man with hardly a struggle. Margery had no doubts in her own mind that with Lavina nominally out of the way she could now safely count on having Sam to herself; but then, she did not really know Lavina.

Being able to leave the sphere made a great difference to Derek as he was able to get as much exercise as he wanted without being dependent on the weather, and whenever he was not engaged trying to amuse the sick Lavina in her cabin, or asleep in his own, he was out in the frosty, snow-filled air which he thoroughly enjoyed.

As he soon grew tired of walking up and down within sight of the Ark he decided to employ himself in banking the snow up under its platform and cutting a set of steps in the bank up to its door. Some of the others helped him in his shovelling from time to time and the business was completed by the end of the second day of Lavina's indisposition.

It then occurred to him that it would be a good thing for Fink-Drummond, too, to have some exercise, so he brought the madman up from his prison, muffled him in a warm coat and, taking him outside, walked him up and down. As he could only take very short paces, owing to the chain which linked his ankles, the experiment did not prove very successful and such slow-going was anything but pleasant with the thermometer well below zero.

It was a long time now since Fink-Drummohd had had one of his fits of insanity, although he still remained apparently dumb; so, having decided that there was little risk of trouble as long as he was in this quiet mood, Derek borrowed Hem-mingway's loaded crop in order to defend himself if he was attacked and undid the padlock which secured the chain round the prisoner's legs. The result justified his humane gesture as the lunatic seemed delighted at the chance to stretch himself properly, and behaved quite perfectly, even when he was led back to his cell afterwards and had the chains replaced on his feet.

It was on the fifth day after they had been lost that the snow at last ceased falling. White clouds heavy with it still lingered overhead, but once again they were able to see the surrounding country. To the south of them the great flood had disappeared but the five days' fall of snow had been so heavy that it was impossible to pick out the characteristics of the landscape in detail. On every side they could see long, rolling slopes of snow running into other slopes until these gradually faded into the distance, while in the foreground the universal whiteness was broken here and there by a hedge or coppice that had not been completely covered. They had just decided to set out on another expedition to try and find the grey stone house when the clouds parted and a pale sun shone through.

It was ten days since Gervaise had had a chance to shoot the sun so he immediately got out his sextant, and so eager were the others to know in what country they had come to earth that all thought of the expedition was abandoned while he took an observation and worked out their position. At last he said:

'Our latitude is now 71 degrees 26 minutes north.'

"Then we're still right up in the Artie Circle,' Hemmingway said at once, 'and much farther north than Iceland.'

'I think we must be in Greenland,' Gervaise replied, 'although I'd never imagined that its scenery looked anything like that which we saw here on the day we were washed ashore.'

'I hadn't, either,' Hemmingway agreed, 'but the scenery of the world doesn't vary quite as much as most people are apt to think. I've seen photographs of parts of semi-tropical Africa which look very like England; and in winter, when there's plenty of snow on the mountains, distant views of Greece might be mistaken for Norway later in the year. Still, if only the sky keeps clear you'll be able to get some altitudes of the stars tonight and fix our longitude; then we'll really know where we are.'

As the weather remained good, Sam and Hemmingway made an expedition that afternoon to try and find the house, but the snow had obliterated such features of the landscape as they remembered so they had to return without having had any success. Derek, meanwhile, exercised Finkie, this being his third outing, and he continued to behave like a model prisoner.

At sundown they watched the sky anxiously but luck was with them. A large section of it remained unclouded, so Gervaise was able to take another observation of the sun at its setting, and an hour later he took the altitudes of some of the principal stars which they were able to identify from their celestial charts. After a couple of hours' work with Oliver's books of logarithms Gervaise gave them their exact position on the earth's surface. It proved to be 71 degrees 25 minutes north and 9 degrees 10 minutes west.

'That settles it,' said Hemmingway, pointing to a spot on the map. 'We're on Jan Mayen Island, up on the edge of the Ice Barrier—about 280 miles east of the coast of Greenland.'

'The hell we are!' exclaimed Lavina, who was with them, having now recovered from her chill.

'Not a very jolly prospect,' agreed Sam. 'I don't suppose the place was ever inhabited except by a few fisher-folk; and we won't find much to start life with again in any of their cottages. It would have been a much better outlook if the Ark had beached itself somewhere within reasonable distance of the great cities.'

Gervaise had been looking over Hemmingway's shoulder at the map. 'I suppose you're right about our being on Jan Mayen, as it's the only land anywhere within several hundred miles of the position I worked out. But, actually, the most northern point of the island barely touches the 71st parallel and we're 25 minutes north of that.'

'1 know,' Hemmingway nodded. 'But you must remember that the chronometers may be a little out.'

'Anyway, there's plenty of timber,' remarked Derek. 'If we put our backs into it we could build a seaworthy boat, get down to Iceland, re-fit, and make our way by easy stages through the Hebrides to Scotland and so to London.'

'Easy stages!' echoed Lavina. 'Hundreds of miles in an open boat! No thank you, Handsome, not for this child—at least, not till next summer anyway.'

'There's no point in trying to get to London,' Margery put in. Everyone will have been drowned and the place will be a shambles. The land here looked good for cultivation and I can see no reason why happy homes could not be made here for those of us who're prepared to work.'

'I don't think we have much choice,' Gervaise announced dryly. 'Now the flood has subsided, all the dead bodies of animals and humans will be decaying farther south, and the air will be full of pestilence within a week. Even if we could make a seaworthy boat, as Derek suggests, I wouldn't dream of leading you there until the cold of another winter has killed off the bacilli. Here, we'll at least be safe from plague, as the ice and snow will prevent the corpses rotting. I'm, er—not a religious man, as you know, but it almost seems as if a merciful Providence had ordained that we should land in a place where we could live without fear of being stricken down by some terrible fever.'

'I suppose half a loaf's better than no bread, dearest,' sighed Lavina, 'but I think it's a pretty mean kind of Providence, all the same. Just think what we'll have to go through stuck here during an Arctic winter.'

The thoughts of darkness, cold and discomfort which her words called up were so grim that none of them cared to discuss the prospect further and soon afterwards they went to bed.

The next morning it was a cold but sunny day again; so they decided to make another expedition towards the higher ground. Derek had now formed the conclusion that Finkie was no longer dangerous and, being fond of all dumb beasts, had come to regard him as a sort of tame animal. In consequence he insisted, rather against the wishes of the others, that instead of the imbecile being left a prisoner all day, he should be taken with them. When the whole party set out from the Ark soon after breakfast, therefore, Finkie shuffled along at Derek's side like a morose Caliban.

The going was not easy because the snow was thick, they had no snow-shoes and they occasionally came into heavy drifts which delayed their progress; so they covered barely a mile an hour. Hedges and woods barring their paths at intervals also necessitated considerable detours and it was eleven o'clock before they came upon any other sign that the land had been inhabited by human before the flood.

This was an unnatural hump rising in a corner of one of the fields, and when Derek had knocked some of the snow off it with one of the spades they had brought, they discovered it to be a motor-tractor. The fact that it had been made in England, as they saw by the manufacturer's plate, gave them a strange sense of comfort, and, as Gervaise remarked, since they still had a good supply of petrol left in the Ark, the tractor might come in very useful to them later on.

It had taken them ten minutes or more to clear the snow away and it was only when they had finished that Derek suddenly said: 'Where's Finkie?'

Swinging round they saw that Fink-Drummond had disappeared.

Behind them in the snow his tracks showed that he had padded to the nearest bank, and the black small-wood and leaves of a hedge could be seen through the snow, marking the place where he had scrambled over it.

Derek and Hemmingway ran to the hedge and looked over, but Finkie was nowhere to be seen and his track led towards a small wood in which, if he had decided to hide from them, it was going to be very difficult to find him.

'I shouldn't worry,' Gervaise called to them. 'He'll make his way back to the Ark as soon as he's cold and hungry.' So, for the moment, they abandoned any thought of trying to recapture him and continued their exploration of the country.

Scrambling up a smooth bank of snow an hour later Gervaise suddenly tripped and fell; burying his arms, which he had thrown out to save himself, in the snow up to his elbows. Picking himself up he began to kick round with his feet and soon discovered that the satin-smooth snow surface concealed something unusual.

'This isn't earth below here,' he said, 'it's something jagged and uneven.' Stooping down he pulled out a yellow brick; upon which they set to work clearing the snow in various places and soon found that the mound concealed the ruins of a modern cottage.

'It was probably only a jerry-built place,' Sam remarked, 'and that's why the flood bowled it over.' His idea was confirmed a moment later when Margery gave a cry of dismay. In moving some bricks she had uncovered the sole of a boot and, on pulling at it, had suddenly realised that it had a dead foot inside it which was still attached to a leg and body buried deeper in the debris.

They covered the foot up again, left the mound and went on, still looking for the grey stone house; but they could not find it and at one o'clock sat down to the picnic lunch they had brought with them.