And although I was driving the big car up Park Lane for Oxford Street and the road to the West, I did feel as if I were in a dream. My whole life had been altered by the events of the past few days, ruined for ever it might be. To-night its stream was violently diverted from its course. Everything with which I was familiar had flashed away, and I was on the brink of the fantastic and unknown. There was not a man in London setting out upon so strange an errand, under circumstances so unprecedented, as I was this night. We slid by a huge white house, set back from the railings, and with all its windows looking out over the Park. It was the London palace that Mr. Van Adams had built for himself during the last five years, and the strangeness of my affair was intensified at the sight. Only a few hours ago the great man had been sitting in my chambers, and introducing the enigmatic figure that sat behind me in the car. Here was a dream figure indeed! It was impossible to think of Danjuro as a human being. He was just a brain, a specialized force, devoted to one object, and probably, as Van Adams had hinted, the supreme force of its kind in existence. Already I had placed myself in his hands, and not only my personal interests, dear as those were to me, but my responsibilities to the State as well, and that was no small thing for him to have achieved in so short a space of time. The unique detachment and concentration that was sitting behind me had an almost magical effect upon one's mind and will. With such help, surely, I could not fail? I fell to thinking of what the Japanese had already achieved, the quiet and masterly skill of his analysis, the cold audacity of his plot to keep Helzephron in London, the neatness and finish of his operations as witnessed by the periscope upon the dinner-table at the "Mille Colonnes." Surely, Helzephron, or whoever was the master-criminal, was a doomed man with Danjuro on his track? We were running out of Ealing now, and traffic was almost gone in the long, straight westward road among the acres of market gardens and glass-houses that fringe the western approach to the metropolis. I let out the powerful engines, and as the car leapt like a spurred horse, my heart leapt up into anger at the name Helzephron.