om my
chair. 'Very clever,' I said condescendingly. 'But--"The Time Machine"
is a delightful book, don't you think? So entirely original!'

'You are pleased to sneer,' said the Devil, who had also risen, 'but it
is one thing to write about an impossible machine; it is a quite other
thing to be a Supernatural Power.' All the same, I had scored.

Berthe had come forth at the sound of our rising. I explained to her
that Mr. Soames had been called away, and that both he and I would be
dining here. It was not until I was out in the open air that I began to
feel giddy. I have but the haziest recollection of what I did, where I
wandered, in the glaring sunshine of that endless afternoon. I remember
the sound of carpenters' hammers all along Piccadilly, and the bare
chaotic look of the half-erected 'stands.' Was it in the Green Park, or
in Kensington Gardens, or WHERE was it that I sat on a chair beneath a
tree, trying to read an evening paper? There was a phrase in the leading
article that went on repeating itself in my fagged mind--'Little is
hidden from this august Lady full of the garnered wisdom of sixty years
of Sovereignty.' I remember wildly conceiving a letter (to reach Windsor
by express messenger told to await answer):

'MADAM,--Well knowing that your Majesty is full of the garnered wisdom
of sixty years of Sovereignty, I venture to ask your advice in the
following delicate matter. Mr. Enoch Soames, whose poems you may or may
not know,'....

Was there NO way of helping him--saving him? A bargain was a bargain,
and I was the last man to aid or abet any one in wriggling out of a
reasonable obligation. I wouldn't have lifted a little finger to save
Faust. But poor Soames!--doomed to pay without respite an eternal price
for nothing but a fruitless search and a bitter disillusioning....

Odd and uncanny it seemed to me that he, Soames, in the flesh, in the
waterproof cape, was at this moment living in the last decade of the
next century, poring over books not yet written, and seeing and seen by
men not yet born. Uncannier and odder still, that to-night and evermore
he would be in Hell. Assuredly, truth was stranger than fiction.

Endless that afternoon was. Almost I wished I had gone with Soames--not
indeed to stay in the reading-room, but to sally forth for a brisk
sight-seeing walk around a new London. I wandered restlessly out of the
Park I had sat in. Vainly I tried to imagine myself an ardent tourist
from t