The two men looked at each other, and it was a look of anguish. The sudden cruel dreadfulness, the hideous mutation which might send the English people out of their land on the strange quest for a new home crushed them into an emotional inanition. They did not seem to exist. Their lips lost their color, and only the paralysis of stupor saved them from breaking down into sobs. It was a few moments later that Leacraft spoke. He asked, “And the people of Glasgow. How did they get away?” Sir John Clarke scarcely raised his head and his words scarcely formed an articulate whisper; “They went by steamers.” CHAPTER VII. IN LONDON, FEBRUARY, 1910. In the smoking room of the Bothwell Club, on Cheapside, back of St. Paul’s, London, on February 12th, in the year of grace, 1910, two men sat in attitudes of earnest attention. A third man older than either with his back to a blazing fire, whose simulated effect of comfort arose from the curling tendrills of gas flames that swept over another simulation of heaped up logs, was speaking with desperate emphasis. He seldom looked at his arrested auditors, nor indeed moved, except when he raised his head, and his eyes, strained with a hopeless longing, sought the gay frescoes of the ceiling, or when, in pauses of his declamations, he walked to a window and raising the curtain looked out upon the city, up to the dome of St. Paul’s, which rose like an Irkutsk igloo above a plain of snow. The man was Alexander Leacraft, the auditors were Mr. Archibald Edward Thomsen and Jim Skaith, both familiar to the reader as rescued and rescuing, in that awful day of November 28th, when the last little band of citizens, led by the provost-marshal, had slipped away in the storm from Edinburgh. Strange things had happened since then: much stranger were in store. The train in which Sir John C-- and his companions escaped, had made its way with painful slowness, and before the English line was reached had stopped repeatedly until it was necessary to desert it. And then the weary crowd of refugees had staggered on their way to a distant station, along a country side emptied of its inhabitants, with the low houses of the country people evident only as mounds of snow. And, with many struggles, with mutual assistance, with prayers and suffering, the men pushed on in the closest companionship, brought by the terrors and dangers of the journey into the usual unhesitating intimacy of peril. They took each other’s places in the work of excavation, helped all to flounder and press through the drifts, divided their company into the weak and strong, and so allotted tasks that the co-operation of all helped their common progress. Camps were made in which shelters were clumsily provided, with tents brought from Edinburgh, and which only the industry of the watchers saved also from burial in the tossing drifts.