And now once more—_finis_ to the episode which he had thought to be the story ending only in death. He sat mechanically at the writing-table in his library and began to open the letters that had come during his absence. A leathern Government despatch case containing the day’s papers from the office which he had only hurriedly visited that morning, awaited his attention. The deathly sensation that they no longer concerned him held him in a cold grip. There was a flaming article from a Croatian statesman which had reached _The New Universe_ through devious channels, fraught with pregnant information. He glanced through it in impotent detachment, like that of a dead man brought back to the conduct of his affairs. He was no longer the dynamo of _The New Universe_. Other forces, who and what he knew not, would in a day or two take his place. _The New Universe_ would have to get on, as best it could, without him. He was dead. He had no more to do with _The New Universe_ than with the internal affairs of Mars. He opened an envelope addressed in a well-known handwriting and franked with distinguished initials. It had been delivered by messenger. Like a dead man he read the achievement of his ambition: He was a Minister of the Crown. The public announcement awaited only his formal acceptance. He stared dully at the idle words. And then suddenly mad rage against the derisive irony of his destiny shook him and he sprang from his chair, and, in the unsympathetic privacy of the room which he had not furnished, he stormed in foolish fury and vain agony of soul. . . . It was the end of John Baltazar—the John Baltazar in whom he had always believed, at the moment of proof positive of the justification of his faith. To Godfrey he had not boasted unduly. A year ago he had awakened, a new Rip Van Winkle, to a world for two years at war. In a few months, God knows how, save through his resistless energy, his new-born and flaming patriotism and his keen brain, he had established himself in England as a driving force compelling recognition and application to the country’s needs. He had won his position by sheer strength of personality. Transcendental mathematics and Chinese scholarship he had thrown into the dust-heap of broken toys. He had emerged from philosophic childhood into the active life of a man, with his strong hands fingering the strings of the world’s war. Now the strings were in his grasp. . . . He had looked far ahead. This Ministry, though of vast importance, was yet subordinate to the Greater Powers of the State. He was young. What was fifty-one? The infancy stage of statesmanship. Why should not he, John Baltazar, rise to higher power and guide the civilized world to victory and to triumphant peace?