Jubilant he walked across the station yard, up Cockspur Street and Pall Mall. He felt strong—nay, more—all-powerful. A force before which all the rats of Donnithorpes and lawyers in the world must crumble. He had no plan; no idea how he should counter Donnithorpe’s machinations. He had been accustomed all his life long to wait for the perilous moment and then get in his grip. He had glorious faith in his destiny. His and Godfrey’s. The destiny of the House of Baltazar. The war over, Godfrey would find some sweet English girl and marry her; and there would be a son to carry on the torch and hand it, in his turn, to the next generation. Striding up St. James’s Street, he saw the babe; made calculations of dates. He would last at least till seventy-five. The grandson then would be on the verge of manhood. . . . He laughed. Odd that he should have lived for fifty years before dreaming of the continuance of his race. Those infernal years in China! He cursed them. Never mind. If he had gone on in the humdrum certainty of the perpetuation of his name he would have missed the present glory of the conception. It was a wonderful world. He lunched at his club with Weatherley and Burtenshaw, optimistic to gasconade, prophesying the speedy end of the war; then the millennium; the world ruled by Anglo-Saxon fibre of brain and body inspired by Latin nervous force—the combination towards which civilization had been groping for centuries. At ten minutes to three he waved them farewell and drove in a taxi to his appointment in Bedford Row. He was shown into a room where Edgar Donnithorpe and an impassive elderly man with a face like a horse awaited him. He felt that he entered like an irresistible force. CHAPTER XXIV HE stood, an hour later, on the pavement of that noiseless and forlorn thoroughfare, and stared at the latest catastrophe which, like all the others in his impulsive life, he had of his own deliberate act contrived. As yet he failed fully to understand his defeat—for defeat it was, surrender absolute and unconditional. He thrust his hat to the back of his head and mopped his forehead, and moved slowly up the street in amazed reaction from the glow of conquest which warmed him as he had entered the office. He had gone without any plan of campaign, confident in his intellectual resource to meet emergency. Merciless craft and cunning vindictiveness met him. Under the fierce sunshine, angry shame made him hotter, and the sweat poured down his face. He had been able only to bluster and threaten in vain retaliation. The grey rat of a man had laughed at him with rasping thinness. The horse-faced lawyer had smiled professional deprecation of heroics. “I shall do this and that,” he declared. “Then our action will be so and so,” they countered. Like the Duke of Wellington, he cried: “Publish and be damned.” They pointed out with icy logic that not they but he and his would suffer inevitable condemnation.