The police were the first to learn what had happened. The startling story of the capture at first was scoffed at; but when the truth was made quite sure, the effect upon the Force was staggering. The police had long felt that there was a power arrayed against them which could not be subdued by ordinary means. They knew the extent to which the normal machinery of the criminal law had broken down. And now it was completely shattered! The men were powerless, and realising the fact, they felt like straws borne on the waves of a tumultuous river towards an unknown sea. The general public were entirely ignorant of what had happened, and the news that came from the naval ports late on the afternoon of Christmas Day was too absorbing to permit of much inquiry about what was taking place nearer home. Whatever families of other judges and magistrates might be asking or wondering, Aldwyth Westwood, as yet, knew of no reason for special anxiety about her father. For the past few weeks he had scarcely been at home. Weary of the police escort which had been told off to accompany him daily from Hill Street to the Law Courts, he had taken up his quarters at the Inns of Court Hotel, going not at all to his chambers in the Temple, but traversing, as he thought unnoticed, the short distance between Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Carey Street. There, in the room allotted to him as one of the law officers of the Crown, and burdened with his colleague’s official work as well as his own, the Solicitor-General had passed the days, forcing his brain to work, and haunted ever with the dread of a physical relapse. The eager people who rushed to the news-agents’ shops on the morning of Bank Holiday were not seeking news concerning his Majesty’s judges, but were hoping to learn more of the movements of the hostile fleets and the reported conflagration at Portsmouth dockyard. News there was none. Not a single journal had been published. The great body of compositors had followed the example of the gas-workers; and the _Epoch_, which alone among London journals could have commanded the services of the men, had published nothing since its special edition of the previous day. Baulked at the shuttered newspaper shops, hosts of people made for the railway stations in the hope that the bookstalls might have been supplied with special news. But here, too, everything was blank. Nothing authentic was ascertainable; but rumours were going round of interrupted communication with the provinces, of wires cut in all directions, and, worse still, of mysterious explosions in several tunnels, which blocked certain of the railways, and severed the links between London and the coast. An air of awe and anxious expectancy appeared on the faces of the bewildered people, and, too excited to remain in their houses, as the day wore on they came in ever-increasing numbers into the streets, until the snow on road and footway was churned into black and penetrating slush.