The two passed out into the roadway, and took their place among the slowly moving people there, the Inspector make a way for himself and his companion through the excited, talkative, good-humored Cockney crowd. "There it is! Can't you see it? Up there just like a little yellow worm." "There's naught at all! You've got the cobble-wobbles!" and then a ripple of laughter. Sherston was borne along with the human stream, and with that stream he suddenly found himself stopped at the westward end of Wellington Street. Over the heads of the people before him--they were, oddly enough, mostly women--he could see the column of flame still burning steadily upwards, and scarcely affected at all by the huge jets of water now playing on it. It seemed to start from the ground, a massive pillar of fire, and all round it was an empty space--a zone no human being could approach for fear of being at once roasted and shriveled up to death. "The bomb got down to the big gas main," observed a voice close to him. "It'll be days before they get THAT fire under!" He, Sherston, felt marvelously calm. This strange, awful visitation had made for him a breathing space in which to reconsider what he had better do, and suddenly he decided that he would go and consult Mr. Pomeroy. But before doing that he must force himself to go back and fetch certain documents which fortunately he had kept.... He made his way, with a great deal of difficulty--for it was as if all London had by now flocked to this one afflicted area--by a circuitous way to the Strand. Tramping through a six-inch-deep flood of broken glass he made his way by the Embankment and the Waterloo Bridge steps to the upper level, that leading to, and past, Peter the Great Terrace. A vast host was now westward from over the river, and he felt the electric currents of joyous excitement, retrospective fear, and, above all, of eager, almost ferocious, curiosity, linking up rapidly about him. The rough and ready cordon of special constables seemed powerless to dam the human tide, and caught in that tide's eddies, Sherston struggled helplessly. "Let me through," he shouted at last. "I MUST get through!" "You can't get through just here--there's a house been struck in Peter the Great Terrace! 'Twas the last bomb did it!" Sherston uttered a groan--Ah! If only that were true! But he had just now glanced up and seen the row of big substantial eighteenth century houses, of which his was the end one, solidly outlined against the star-powdered sky, though every pane of glass had been blown out. Then some one turned round. "It's the corner house been struck. Bomb fell right through the skylight. They've sent for the firemen to see what damage was done. You can't see anything from this side." THROUGH THE SKYLIGHT? Sherston was a powerful man. He forced his way, he did not know how, blindly, to the very front of the crowd.