Berlin had had the story of the assassinations with its breakfast-rolls and hot creamed coffee. Now, in the blue-white glare of the great electric arc-lamps of the Paris boulevards, men and women leaned over one another’s shoulders to get a whiff of the big black letters on the displayed contents-bills; at every kiosk and bookstall the newspaper-vendors were sold out; much-thumbed copies of the papers were bought by knowing speculators, to be sold and bought and sold again. The Kaiser at Kiel was racing his own clipper when the operator of the Imperial private wireless read a story from the notes of the singing spark that smote him pale and sick. When his anointed master heard the gory news, his chief regret seems to have concerned the untimely decease of the partner of his "life-work." "It will have," he said with bitterness, "to be begun all over again!" One wonders, in the blood-red light of four years of dreadful carnage, seeing Hell and its dark Powers still unchained, and raging on this War-torn earth of ours—what would have been the nature of the edifice reared by these two Imperial craftsmen, had the younger not been removed by a violent and sudden death? Did the prospect of unlocking—with one touch on an electric button and the scrawl of a wet pen—the brazen gates of Death and Terror ever strike cold to the heart of the rufous Hapsburg Archduke? Madness, we know, is in the blood of his evil-fated House. But, when the shots from a Bosnian High School student’s revolver pierced Franz Ferdinand’s brain and body, was he sane enough to realise that the crime of the Anarchist had saved his own name from foul, indelible, and hideous infamy? We shall know when the trumpet of the Archangel sounds the Last Réveillé, and the grave gives up its dead, and the Sea spews forth its victims, and the secrets of that deeper abyss, the human heart, are revealed in the sheer, awful Light that streams from the Throne of God. *CHAPTER XIII* *THE SUPERMAN*