As it happened the train stopped about a hundred yards short of Dover Street, and would not move on. Seconds and minutes passed, and the stoppage became undeniably a breakdown. The tunnels under the earth from Dover Street back to Hammersmith were full of stopped trains a few hundred yards apart, and every train was full of serious people who positively had to be at a certain place at a certain time. Lilian’s mood changed; the mood of the car changed, and of the train and of all the trains. No one knew anything; no one could do anything; the trains were each a prison. The railway company by its officials maintained a masterly silence as to the origin of the vast inconvenience and calamity. Rumours were born by spontaneous generation. A man within Lilian’s hearing, hitherto one of God’s quite minor achievements, was suddenly gifted with divination and announced that the electricians at the power station in Lots Road had gone on strike without notice and every electric train in London had been paralysed. Half an hour elapsed. The prisoners, made desperate by the prospect of the fate which attended them, spoke of revolution and homicide, well aware that they were just as capable of these things as a flock of sheep. Then, as inexplicably as it had stopped, the train started. Two minutes later Lilian, with some scores of other girls, was running madly through Dover Street in vain pursuit of time lost and vanished. Not a soul had guessed the cause of the disaster, which, according to the evening papers, was due to an old, unhappy man who had wandered unobserved into the tunnel from Dover Street station with the ambition to discover for himself what the next world was like. This ambition had been gratified. As Lilian, in a state of nervous exhaustion, flew on tired wings up the office stairs she of course had to compose herself into a semblance of bright, virginal freshness for the day’s work, conformably with the employer’s theory that until he reaches the office the employee has done and suffered nothing whatever. And Miss Grig was crossing the ante-room at the moment of Lilian’s entry. "You’re twenty-five minutes late, Miss Share," said Miss Grig coldly. She looked very ill. "So sorry, Miss Grig," Lilian answered with unprotesting humility, and offered no explanation.