and had intoxicated
himself with her beauty, fully aware that for each moment of pleasure
there would, later on, be a corresponding moment of pain. It was only
in romance, he told himself, that the penniless lover suddenly finds
himself in a position to marry--in reality, his love suit is rejected
with scorn; his adored one marries some one who has, or pretends he
has, limitless wealth; and the despised swain ends his days a
miserable and dejected bachelor.

All the same, Shiel determined that he would for once fare like the
hero in romance--that he would either win the object of his affections
or perish in the attempt; and no sooner did the fit of the blues,
consequent on the conversation just related, wear off, than he set to
work in grim earnest to discover some means of breaking up the Modern
Sorcery Company Ltd., and of restoring to the firm of Martin and
Davenport their former prestige.

In the meanwhile, affairs were by no means stationary, as far as Hamar
and his colleagues were concerned. The appearance of their paper
_To-morrow_, a morning journal, that chronicled faithfully every event
of the following day, caused a tremendous sensation; and the sale of
every other paper sank to nil--no one, naturally, wanting to buy the
news that had happened yesterday, when, for the same money, they could
obtain news of what would happen that very day. The stupid method of
chronicling past events, Hamar announced in the first issue of his
organ, was now obsolete. It was, perhaps, good enough for the
Victorian era, but it was utterly out of keeping with the present age
of hourly progress. Who, for instance, wanted to know that at 6 p.m.,
on the preceding evening, there had been a big fire in New York? Was
it not far more to the point for them to learn, for example, that at 2
p.m., on that very day, Rio de Janeiro would be partially destroyed by
an earthquake; that the Post Office in King's Road, Chelsea, would be
broken into by thieves; that Nelson's Monument in Trafalgar Square
would be blown up by Suffragettes; or something equally fresh and
exciting? One cannot get thrills--at least not the right kind of
thrills in reading of what has already taken place. To say to
ourselves, or to a friend, "Just fancy, we might have been in that
railway accident," or, in reading of a shipwreck "What a mercy we did
not embark after all, is it not?" is not half as enthralling as to be
wondering if, at eleven o'clock that night, when the