rfully in the morning breeze. The nursery grounds were
everywhere crimson with the weed, a wide expanse of livid colour cut
with purple shadows, and very painful to the eye. One's gaze went
with infinite relief from the scorched greys and sullen reds of the
foreground to the blue-green softness of the eastward hills.

The line on the London side of Woking station was still undergoing
repair, so I descended at Byfleet station and took the road to
Maybury, past the place where I and the artilleryman had talked to the
hussars, and on by the spot where the Martian had appeared to me in
the thunderstorm. Here, moved by curiosity, I turned aside to find,
among a tangle of red fronds, the warped and broken dog cart with the
whitened bones of the horse scattered and gnawed. For a time I stood
regarding these vestiges. . . .

Then I returned through the pine wood, neck-high with red weed here
and there, to find the landlord of the Spotted Dog had already found
burial, and so came home past the College Arms. A man standing at an
open cottage door greeted me by name as I passed.

I looked at my house with a quick flash of hope that faded
immediately. The door had been forced; it was unfast and was opening
slowly as I approached.

It slammed again. The curtains of my study fluttered out of the
open window from which I and the artilleryman had watched the dawn. No
one had closed it since. The smashed bushes were just as I had left
them nearly four weeks ago. I stumbled into the hall, and the house
felt empty. The stair carpet was ruffled and discoloured where I had
crouched, soaked to the skin from the thunderstorm the night of the
catastrophe. Our muddy footsteps I saw still went up the stairs.

I followed them to my study, and found lying on my writing-table
still, with the selenite paper weight upon it, the sheet of work I had
left on the afternoon of the opening of the cylinder. For a space I
stood reading over my abandoned arguments. It was a paper on the
probable development of Moral Ideas with the development of the
civilising process; and the last sentence was the opening of a
prophecy: "In about two hundred years," I had written, "we may
expect----" The sentence ended abruptly. I remembered my inability
to fix my mind that morning, scarcely a month gone by, and how I had
broken off to get my _Daily Chronicle_ from the newsboy. I remembered
how I went down to the garden gate as he came along, and how I