In the reception-room the mystified guests of the Trust found coffee and liqueurs, music and song and pleasant conversation, which touched on every possible subject, save battle, murder, and sudden death. Then came a stroll on the walls by the light of a brilliant _Aurora_, which made the sun, which was just touching the southern horizon, look like a pallid and exaggerated moon, and during this stroll Victor Fargeau managed to pass a small Lebel revolver and some cartridges to Sophie and the count in case of accidents. They had decided to go on board the _Ivan the Terrible_ when the guests left the works, and Ma'm'selle Felice and the count's servant were already putting their baggage together. The train was to wait for them at midnight. Meanwhile, Doctor Lamson, who had left the party immediately after dinner, had been getting the defences of the works in order. The huge engines, disconnected now from the absorbers and storage batteries, from which the captured world-soul was now being released back into the earth, were still purring softly, and working as mightily as ever, but now their force was being used to a different end. On each of the four towers at the corners of the quadrangle there had been mounted an apparatus which looked something like a huge searchlight, and underneath it were two real searchlights. On eight platforms, one on each side of the towers, but hidden by a circular wall of twelve-inch hardened steel, were mounted, on disappearing carriages, the president's big guns, enlarged copies of the one he had used so effectually on board the _Nadine_. Each would throw a shell containing a hundred pounds of Vandelite to a distance of eight miles. The great engines worked continuously, storing up liquid air in chambers under the gun platforms, but they were also doing other and, for the present, much more deadly work. The huge copper tubes above the searchlights on the towers were turned above the harbour. They made neither light nor sound, but all the while they were accumulating destruction such as no mortal hand had yet dealt out to an enemy. The evening passed, apparently in the most friendly and peaceful fashion, and no one suddenly introduced into the reception-room would have dreamt that the members of Lord Orrel's dinner-party were not on the very best of terms with themselves and each other. Not even Adelaide or Sophie, sitting there with their revolvers in the pockets of their dinner dresses, and thoughts of murder in their souls, had the remotest idea of how terribly it was destined to end.