seemed to stand up, violent and unaccountable,
against an ultimate horizon, visions from the verge.
The ends of the earth were closing in.

Talk had been going on steadily as he took in
the scene; and not the least of the contrasts of
that bewildering breakfast-table was the contrast
between the easy and unobtrusive tone of talk and
its terrible purport. They were deep in the discus-
sion of an actual and immediate plot. The waiter
down-stairs had spoken quite correctly when he
said that they were talking about bombs and kings.
Only three days afterwards the Czar was to meet
the President of the French Republic in Paris, and
over their bacon and eggs upon their sunny balcony
these beaming gentlemen had decided how both
should die. Even the instrument was chosen; the
black-bearded Marquis, it appeared, was to carry
the bomb.

Ordinarily speaking, the proximity of this pos-
itive and objective crime would have sobered Syme,
and cured him of all his merely mystical tremors.
He would have thought of nothing but the need
of saving at least two human bodies from being
ripped in pieces with iron and roaring gas. But
the truth was that by this time he had begun to
feel a third kind of fear, more piercing and practical

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