"Dashed if I know the difference between the vulgar way of dying and the other style!" Brayham snorted apoplectically, feeling in his waistcoat-pocket for the box of digestive tabloids that showed in a bulge. "Dashed unpleasant certainty—however you look at it! And a man who weighs eighteen stone at fifty has _got_ to look at it, every time his tailor lets out his waistcoats, and his valet asks him to order more collars because the last lot have shrunk in the wash." "Ah, yes, to die is a hellish bore!" agreed von Herrnung, contemplating his obese and purple host with a cruel smile. "But I and my friends have no Hell, and we have done away with the myth of Heaven. To dissolve and be reabsorbed into the elements—that is the only after-life that is possible for a Superman." "You’d hardly call it Life, would you?" came unwillingly from Franky. For von Herrnung’s eyes seemed to challenge his own. "’_Imperial Cæsar, dead and turned to clay_,’ what?" quoted Courtley, to whom von Herrnung transferred his smiling regard. "I venture to hope that my clay may serve a more patriotic purpose than stopping a draught-hole," said the German, carefully fingering the tight roll of glittering red hair upon his upper-lip. "It may be baked into a sparking-plug for the aëro-motor of one of our Zeppelin dirigibles—the mysterious Z. X., for instance, in whose trial trip from Stettin across the Baltic to Upsala in Sweden you were so keenly interested some months ago. Or some of my body’s chemical constituents may pass into the young tree beneath which my ashes will be deposited. If beech or spruce, then I may furnish ribs or struts for an Aviatik or a Taube. But the best way of continuing to exist after one is dead is to leave plenty of vigorous sons behind one. To perpetuate the race"—he continued speaking to Lord Norwater, who had flushed and moved restlessly—"that is the high and noble obligation Duty imposes upon the German Superman." "You’ll have to hurry up your matrimonial arrangements, Tido," interposed the Goblin, with her cackle, "if your family is to tot up to a respectable number before the year 1916." "You mean that I may get killed in our great War of Extermination? That is possible," agreed von Herrnung. "Our Flying Service is not a profession conducive to long life. Many of our keenest officers remain unmarried for that reason. The Emperor would prefer each of us to marry, or at least adopt a son. For myself, I would like to steal one of your splendid British boys and rear him up as a true German——" Something sharp and keen and burning stabbed through Franky’s brain to his vitals. It would have been a relief to have insulted von Herrnung. He set his teeth, fighting with the desire, as the guttural voice went on: "I would teach him to hate you...." The speaker sucked in his breath as though he relished the idea exceedingly. "You cannot think how he would hate you!—my German-British Superman."