who could give you for certain ten years of time,
you would call him your master."

"My device is: No God! No Master," said the Professor sententiously as
he rose to get off the 'bus.

Ossipon followed. "Wait till you are lying flat on your back at the end
of your time," he retorted, jumping off the footboard after the other.
"Your scurvy, shabby, mangy little bit of time," he continued across the
street, and hopping on to the curbstone.

"Ossipon, I think that you are a humbug," the Professor said, opening
masterfully the doors of the renowned Silenus. And when they had
established themselves at a little table he developed further this
gracious thought. "You are not even a doctor. But you are funny. Your
notion of a humanity universally putting out the tongue and taking the
pill from pole to pole at the bidding of a few solemn jokers is worthy of
the prophet. Prophecy! What's the good of thinking of what will be!"
He raised his glass. "To the destruction of what is," he said calmly.

He drank and relapsed into his peculiarly close manner of silence. The
thought of a mankind as numerous as the sands of the sea-shore, as
indestructible, as difficult to handle, oppressed him. The sound of
exploding bombs was lost in their immensity of passive grains without an
echo. For instance, this Verloc affair. Who thought of it now?

Ossipon, as if suddenly compelled by some mysterious force, pulled a
much-folded newspaper out of is pocket. The Professor raised his head at
the rustle.

"What's that paper? Anything in it?" he asked.

Ossipon started like a scared somnambulist.

"Nothing. Nothing whatever. The thing's ten days old. I forgot it in
my pocket, I suppose."

But he did not throw the old thing away. Before returning it to his
pocket he stole a glance at the last lines of a paragraph. They ran
thus: "_An impenetrable mystery seems destined to hang for ever over this
act of madness or despair_."

Such were the end words of an item of news headed: "Suicide of Lady
Passenger from a cross-Channel Boat." Comrade Ossipon was familiar with
the beauties of its journalistic style. "_An impenetrable mystery seems
destined to hang for ever_. . . . " He knew every word by heart. "_An
impenetrable mystery_. . . . "

And the robust anarchist, hanging his head on his breast, fell into a
long reverie.

He was menaced by this thing in the very sources of his existence. He
could not issue forth to meet