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Conquerors and conquered together, the whole vast city slept that night as never perhaps before or since. After a week of terror, of effort, of despair, and of debauchery, the sorely stricken capital of the British Empire lay that night like a city of the dead. England and her invaders were worn out. At the flat we found Mrs. Van Homrey placidly knitting.
"Yes, you have just missed my niece," said Mrs. Van Homrey, after a kindly reference to the strip of crepe on my arm. "She has gone in to Victoria Street to a 'conference of the powers' of John Crondall's convening. Oh, didn't you know he was here again? Yes, he arrived last week, and, as usual, is up to his neck in affairs already, and Constance with him.
Somehow, my own thoughts had become active in the presence of these women, and were racing over everything that I had seen and heard that day, from the moment of my chat with Wardle, before sunrise, in Holborn. "I don't see any other way to take it," said Mrs. Van Homrey, with laconic emphasis. "Do you?" she added. "Well, you see, I did not begin by taking your view.
Several doctors had volunteered their services, and from one of them I learned that the fainting fit was no more than the momentary result of an exceptional strain of excitement. Within half an hour, Stairs and Reynolds were both resting comfortably in a private sitting-room at a neighbouring hotel, and there I visited them, with Constance Grey and Mrs. Van Homrey, and John Crondall.
But it was none the less with a sigh of relief that I handed her in at the outer door of the mansions in which their flat was situated. We paused for a moment at the stairs' foot, the first moment of privacy we had known that evening, and the last, I thought, with a recollection of Mrs. Van Homrey waiting in the flat above. I know I was deeply moved. My heart seemed full to bursting.
It seemed her aunt, a sister of her father's, had accompanied her to England, and she said: "I promised my aunt, Mrs. Van Homrey, that I would induce you to spare us an evening soon. She loves meeting friends of John Crondall. We dine at eight, but would fix any other hour if it suited you better."
Van Homrey, Constance, Crondall, myself, Sir Herbert Tate, and Forbes Thompson, joined the preachers that evening, quite informally, at their very modest supper board.
Van Homrey," he said, as we all sat down to lunch in the South Kensington flat, "but that's as much as I can promise. You and I will have to keep our feet, Dick, and you will have to share Lady Tate's seat, Constance. If every ticket-holder turns up this afternoon, there won't be a single vacant seat in the whole of that great hall." "You earned your Sunday morning in, John," said Mrs. Van Homrey.
"I couldn't stand another hour of it unless it were necessary, you know," was his way of putting it. By my persuasion he kept his bed during a good slice of Sunday morning, and lunched with me at Constance Grey's flat. He always said that Mrs. Van Homrey was the most restful tonic London could supply to any man.
Her words overpowered me almost by the weight of prescient meaning she gave them. They reached me as from some solemn sanctuary, a fount of inspiration. "We haven't any special information," said Mrs. Van Homrey.
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