But she was quite in the dark about it. She had no notion at all that he was speaking of that great territory which he had discovered far to the south, beyond the ice-floes, beyond the open blue water. It had no inhabitants but the penguins; yet since Rames had spent a winter of darkness on its inhospitable shores and had annexed it for Great Britain, a penny stamp had been struck and postage duly established. The recollection passed in and out of Harry Rames's head, with a hundred trivial thoughts and memories. And it was the mark and consequence of his agitation that his mind acquired an extraordinary and unnatural lucidity so that his thoughts became swift visions of things with a small but surprisingly clear definition, as though he saw them through a diminishing glass. In this supersensitive spirit he walked down Parliament Street at half-past one in the afternoon on the eastern side of the road; and when he had come opposite to the Horse-Guards, he suddenly stopped. Behind the Horse-Guards' Arch and a little to the north rose the great red building of the Admiralty where Cynthia and he had been made acquainted with one another. But it was not of the first meeting nor of the quarrel which ended it that Harry Rames was thinking. He was not looking at the main mass of the Admiralty Building, but only at the three grayish-blue domes which surmounted it. From these domes rose three tall spars at the points of a triangle, each of them rigged and dressed with wires to which were attached curious little hoops and contrivances of cane like Catherine wheels set for a night of fireworks. He was gazing at the mechanism of wireless telegraphy. He had passed those poles either just here or on the other side of the Horse-Guards' Parade in St. James's Park on every day when Parliament was in session; and no doubt he had often enough lifted his head and seen them with the blind eyes of a man for the landmarks he habitually walks by. But this morning his imagination was made acute by a night of wakefulness and the tension of his nerves, and he was sensitive to all the suggestion of that aerial toyshop of contrivances. He stopped. He almost fancied that he heard--so keen was the lucidity of his senses--the messages of distant ships, here tumbling on seas of storm there upright on seas of sunshine, whizzing homeward to the dim smoke-wreathed city, crowding the air. He almost fancied that he saw them, the myriad bright spokes of an illimitable wheel which hung poised roof-high over all the world. His thoughts were swept quite away from England, and the roar of Whitehall died from his ears. He saw the big roadsteads of the East and West Indies and anchored vessels mirrored in waveless seas. He saw the meetings of ships in the narrows of the great trade-routes, barkentine and schooner, tramp and liner, and in and out amongst them like the gray shadows of sharks seen beneath the water, the long cruisers of the fleet.