There was no spare bedroom in that little flat, but the dear old lady had actually made up a bed for me on a couch in the drawing-room, and before she retired for the night she made me free of the bathroom, and supplied me with towels and such like matters, and gave me cake and cocoa; a delicious repast I thought it. And so, while crushed and beaten London lay sleeping off its exhaustion, I slept under Constance Grey's roof, full of gratitude, and of a kind of new hope and gladness, very foreign, one would have said, to my gruesome experiences of the past forty-eight hours. England, the old victorious island kingdom, bequeathed to us by Raleigh, Drake, Nelson; the nineteenth-century England of triumphant commercialism; England till then inviolate for a thousand years; rich and powerful beyond all other lands; broken now under the invader's heel--that ancient England slept. PART II THE AWAKENING Exoriare aliquis de nostris ex ossibus ultor.--VIRGIL. I THE FIRST DAYS The river glideth at his own sweet will. Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; And all that mighty heart is lying still! . . . . . Without Thee, what is all the morning's wealth? Come, blessed barrier between day and day, Dear Mother of fresh thoughts and joyous health! WORDSWORTH. It is safe to say that England's exhausted sleep on the night of Black Saturday marked the end of an era in British history. It was followed by a curious, quiescent half-consciousness during Sunday. For the greater part of that day I should suppose that more than half London's populace continued its sleep. One of the first things I realized after Monday morning's awakening in my Bloomsbury lodging was that I must find wages and work speedily, since I possessed no more than a very few pounds. As a fact, upon that and several subsequent days I found plenty of work, if nothing noticeable in the way of wages. I was second in command of one of the food and labour bureaux which Constance Grey helped to organize, and all the workers in these bureaux were volunteers. Another of my first impressions after the crisis was a sense of my actual remoteness, in normal circumstances, from Constance. Her father had left Constance a quite sufficient income. Mrs. Van Homrey was in her own right comfortably well-to-do. But, despite the exiguous nature of my own resources, it was not the money question which impressed me most in this connection, but rather the fact that, while my only acquaintances in London were of a more or less discreditable sort, Constance seemed to have friends everywhere, and these in almost every case people of standing and importance. Her army friends were apt to be generals, her political friends ex-Ministers, her journalistic friends editors, and so forth. And I---- But you have seen my record up to this point.