FOOTNOTES [7] _I.e._ alluvial plain. [8] ‘Enough!’ [9] Perquisite. [10] Bugle. _THE DAY._ As the cathedral chimes struck eleven, Hubert Quality raised the corner of the blind and looked into the street. A deep peace reigned; the cobbles of the road glistened from recent rain; wet wads of yellowed leaves padded the pavements. Very far away on the horizon, a fitful red quiver told of heathen fires lighted to the dark god Thor. No human form was visible in the street. Yet Quality shrank from the uneasy sensation that some one was spying upon him. Bracing himself with an effort, he looked up furtively into the indigo vault of the heavens—knowing the while that he was about to be subjected to some fresh demonstration of trickery on the part of his nerves. Instantly, he started back with a stifled cry. A face was watching him from the moon. For several full seconds it bleached him, the unhuman stare of century-old eyes, before it blended again into the blank silver disc. With shaking fingers, Quality dropped the curtain—the pallor of his face and the twitching of his features testifying to the cumulative effect of oft-repeated shocks. For the past two weeks, his terror-maddened nerves had rent him with the strength of lunatic devils—making every heart-beat leap like a bead of quicksilver, and chopping up each breath into demi-semiquavers of panting panic. Only the consciousness of one supreme fact held them back from their objective—the wreck of Quality’s sanity. On the morrow, their victim was going home. It was his day. The most cursory glance at his face proclaimed him the predestined prey of his imagination. His dreamy eyes, sensitive mouth, and delicate physique denoted him student—or visionary—rather than man of action, and, as such, averse from any act or form of violence. During the siege and occupation of the town by the enemy, in his rôle of spectator, he had been plunged into a super-hell, in which he groped in a red delirium—fire-flecked and blood-smudged. His razor-keen sympathies supplying the lack of experience, he had died, by proxy, many deaths a day. He had seen human faces blasted by the red-hot touch of the Martian hand, and the sight had not been good to see. Above all, his ears were deafened by the constant terrific speech of great guns that spoke. Peace—passionately he prayed for it. And to-morrow that peace would be his. Soothed by the mere thought of his imminent release, he turned back again towards the room which he had grown to hate. It was a prim, mid-Victorian-looking apartment, stuffy from a porcelain stove and crowded with horsehair furniture. At the round table of highly polished walnut-wood, his landlady sat at her knitting.