A few of the shells must have hit a French _Flying Fish_, which was circling above the centre of the harbour, and disabled the wings and propellors on one side, for she lurched and wobbled for an instant like a bird with a broken wing. Then she swooped downwards in a spiral course, falling ever faster and faster, till she struck the deck of the _Britain_. What happened the next instant no one ever knew. Those who survived said that they heard a crashing roar like the firing of a thousand cannon together; a blinding sheet of flame overspread the harbour; the water rose into mountains of foam, ships rocked and crashed against each other--and then came darkness and oblivion. When human eyes next looked on Dover Harbour there was not a ship in it afloat. Dover, the great stronghold of the south-east, was now as defenceless as a fishing village, and there was nothing to prevent a constant stream of transports filled with men and materials of war being poured into it, or any other port along the eastern Kentish coast. Then would come seizure of railway stations and rolling stock, rapid landing of men and horses and guns, and the beginning of the great advance. On the whole, John Castellan was well satisfied with his work. He regretted the loss of his consort; but she had not been wasted. The remains of the British fleets had gone with her to destruction. Certainly what had been done had brought nearer the time when he, the real organiser of victory, the man who had made the conquest of England possible, would be able to claim his double reward--the independence of Ireland, and the girl whom he intended to make the uncrowned Queen of Erin. It was a splendid and, to him, a delicious dream as well; but between him and its fulfilment, what a chaos of bloodshed, ruin and human misery lay! And yet he felt not a tremor of compunction or of pity for the thousands of brave men who would be flung dead and mangled and tortured into the bloody mire of battle, for the countless homes that would be left desolate, or for the widows and the fatherless whose agony would cry to Heaven for justice on him. No; these things were of no account in his eyes. Ireland must be free, and the girl he had come to love so swiftly, and with such consuming passion, must be his. Nothing else mattered. Was he not Lord of the Air, and should the desire of his heart be denied him? Thus mused John Castellan in the conning-tower of the _Flying Fish_, as he circled slowly above the ruins of Dover, while the man who had beaten him in the swimming-race was sitting in the observatory on far-off Whernside, verifying his night's observations and calculating for the hundredth time the moment of the coming of an Invader, compared with which all the armed legions of Europe were of no more importance than a swarm of flies.