"I quite understand. When I had worked upon your feelings, I was going to show you the whole thing. Then I found out what that fellow Chase had got hold of, and I had to fly off post haste and see his editor. I didn't mind the paper having its 'scare' so long as I came in at the finish with the assurance that there was no need for alarm. "Hence my hurry, and hence my accident. All the same, it was a mean thing, Longdale. Some day perhaps the country will realise what a debt it owes to its men of science." Longdale looked at the yelling joyous mob outside heedless of the sunshine and reckless in the hysteria of the moment. "And perhaps the country will foster them a little more," he said. "Nothing but science could have prevented a calamity that would have multiplied ten-fold the horrors of the Great Plague, and destroyed, not thousands, but tens of thousands." Darbyshire nodded thoughtfully. "One of the things that might have been," he said. "Might have been! We have had a lesson, but I doubt if we shall profit by it. England never seems to profit by anything. It is one of the things that may be. And there is more difference than meets the eye." THE END. End of Project Gutenberg's The Doom of London, by Frederick Merrick White