At ten minutes to ten Mr. Alderman Munt, sustained by roast saddle of mutton and green peas, fruit tart and custard, appeared in the embrasure with a large cigar. Seen from the street he looked a tremendously imposing figure. Even in the midst of the men of light and leading who surrounded him he was a Saul towering among the prophets. Not even his admirers, and in the city of his birth these were singularly few, ventured to call him genial, but there was power, virility, unconscious domination in the far flung glance that marked the press beyond the Club windows. Somehow there was a bulldog look about him that was extraordinarily British. Somehow he looked a good man in a tight place and a bad one to cross. Had the question been asked there was not one among that throng of hushed spectators who could have explained his own presence in the Market Place, nor could he have said just what he was doing there. A powerful magnet had drawn the many together into a limited space on an airless evening in August to gaze at one another and to wonder what was going to happen, yet well knowing that nothing could happen as far as that evening was concerned. But in this strange gathering, in the solemn hush that came upon it from time to time, was the visible evidence that the people of Blackhampton were standing together in a supreme moment. Perhaps it gave a feeling of security that each was shoulder to shoulder with his neighbor in this hour so fateful for themselves, for Blackhampton, for the human race. Nothing happened, yet everything happened. The throng grew denser inside and outside the Imperial Club, but casual remarks became even less frequent, newsboys ceased to shout, and presently the hour of midnight boomed across the square from the great clock on the Corn Exchange and from many neighboring steeples. Nothing happened. But it was Wednesday, August the fifth. The silent multitude began slowly to disperse. A new phase had opened in history. It was not until a quarter past one, by which time four-fifths of the crowd had gone away as quietly as it had assembled, that Bill Hollis slowly made his way home to Love Lane. In his hand was the prize he had so unexpectedly gained, wrapped in the _Evening Star_, but somehow the Show and all the other incidents of a crowded, memorable, even glorious day seemed very far off as his boots echoed along the narrow streets. An imaginative man in whom psychic perception was sometimes raised to a high power, he was oppressed by a stealthy sense of disaster. It was as if an earthquake had shaken the world from pole to pole. It was as if all the people in it were a little dizzy with a vibration they could hardly feel which yet had shivered the foundations of society. XVII