"No. He cannot come. He regrets, but he is engaged on matters of national importance." Silence. Painful silence. In it Hampden seemed to share the cruel frustration of so great a hope deferred. "There is this," he continued, more for the sake of making any suggestion than from a belief in its practicability; "I might go and compel him to come. If he understood the urgency----" "It is too late.... A little time ago there was a thin white mist; now it is a solid wall of dense rolling fog. It is nearer--relentless, unevadable...." "I can still write down what you have to say. Consider, it is the only hope." "I cannot judge.... I had a settled conviction that no other ear.... Stay, quick; there are the notes! Incomplete, but they will put him on the track.... Swear, swear that you will place them in his hand unread." "I swear to do as you ask me. Go on quickly." "To-night, now. Do not ... do not let ... do not wait...." "Yes, yes. But the notes? Where are they? How am I to know them?" The voice was growing very thin and faltering, weaker with every word. The disappointment had sapped all its failing strength at a single blow. "The notes ... yes. You will explain.... The black wall ... how it towers!..." He was whispering inaudibly. Hampden leaned over the dying man in a final effort. "Flak!" he cried, "the notes on the Unity League! Where are they? Speak!" "The envelope"--he caught a breath of sound--"... coat lining.... _I must go_!" Twenty minutes later Sir John picked up his motor brougham in New Oxford Street. He had telephoned immediately on leaving Paradise Buildings for it to start out at once and wait for him near Mudie's corner. In Paradise Street he had seen a bacchanalian group surrounding "Mrs Flak," high priestess, who chanted a song in praise of home and the domestic virtues. It was at this point that he missed the ghoul-child from his side. A south-east wind was carrying the midnight boom of the great clock at Westminster as far as Kilburn when he turned out of the High Road, and the little clocks around had taken up the chorus, like small dogs envious of the baying of a hound, as he stopped before the Home Secretary's house. There was a light still burning in a room on the ground floor, and it was Mr Tubes himself who came to the door. "I have to place in your hands an envelope of papers entrusted to me by a man called Flak who died in Paradise Street an hour ago," said Hampden, and with the act he brought his night of duty as a faithful servant of his Order to an end. "Oh, that's you," said Mr Tubes, peering out into the darkness. "I had a wire about it. So the poor man is dead?" "Yes," replied Hampden a shade drily. "The poor man is dead." Mr Tubes fancied that he saw the lamps of a cab beyond his garden gate, and he wondered whether he was being expected to offer to pay the fare.