“I do not acquiesce,” said Summerlee firmly.

“I don’t see that it matters a row of pins whether you acquiesce or whether you don’t,” remarked Lord John.  “You’ve got to take it, whether you take it fightin’ or take it lyin’ down, so what’s the odds whether you acquiesce or not?

“I can’t remember that anyone asked our permission before the thing began, and nobody’s likely to ask it now.  So what difference can it make what we may think of it?”

“It is just all the difference between happiness and misery,” said Challenger with an abstracted face, still patting his wife’s hand.  “You can swim with the tide and have peace in mind and soul, or you can thrust against it and be bruised and weary.  This business is beyond us, so let us accept it as it stands and say no more.”

“But what in the world are we to do with our lives?” I asked, appealing in desperation to the blue, empty heaven.

“What am I to do, for example?  There are no newspapers, so there’s an end of my vocation.”

“And there’s nothin’ left to shoot, and no more soldierin’, so there’s an end of mine,” said Lord John.

“And there are no students, so there’s an end of mine,” cried Summerlee.

“But I have my husband and my house, so I can thank heaven that there is no end of mine,” said the lady.

“Nor is there an end of mine,” remarked Challenger, “for science is not dead, and this catastrophe in itself will offer us many most absorbing problems for investigation.”

He had now flung open the windows and we were gazing out upon the silent and motionless landscape.

“Let me consider,” he continued.  “It was about three, or a little after, yesterday afternoon that the world finally entered the poison belt to the extent of being completely submerged.  It is now nine o’clock.  The question is, at what hour did we pass out from it?”

“The air was very bad at daybreak,” said I.

“Later than that,” said Mrs. Challenger.  “As late as eight o’clock I distinctly felt the same choking at my throat which came at the outset.”

“Then we shall say that it passed just after eight o’clock.  For seventeen hours the world has been soaked in the poisonous ether.  For that length of time the Great Gardener has sterilized the human mold which had grown over the surface of His fruit.  Is it possible that the work is incompletely done—­that others may have survived besides ourselves?”

“That’s what I was wonderin’” said Lord John.  “Why should we be the only pebbles on the beach?”

“It is absurd to suppose that anyone besides ourselves can possibly have survived,” said Summerlee with conviction.  “Consider that the poison was so virulent that even a man who is as strong as an ox and has not a nerve in his body, like Malone here, could hardly get up the stairs before he fell unconscious.  Is it likely that anyone could stand seventeen minutes of it, far less hours?”