Everybody was alive once more!  Had it all been a delusion?  Was it conceivable that this whole poison belt incident had been an elaborate dream?  For an instant my startled brain was really ready to believe it.  Then I looked down, and there was the rising blister on my hand where it was frayed by the rope of the city bell.  It had really been so, then.  And yet here was the world resuscitated—­here was life come back in an instant full tide to the planet.  Now, as my eyes wandered all over the great landscape, I saw it in every direction—­and moving, to my amazement, in the very same groove in which it had halted.  There were the golfers.  Was it possible that they were going on with their game?  Yes, there was a fellow driving off from a tee, and that other group upon the green were surely putting for the hole.  The reapers were slowly trooping back to their work.  The nurse-girl slapped one of her charges and then began to push the perambulator up the hill.  Everyone had unconcernedly taken up the thread at the very point where they had dropped it.

I rushed downstairs, but the hall door was open, and I heard the voices of my companions, loud in astonishment and congratulation, in the yard.  How we all shook hands and laughed as we came together, and how Mrs. Challenger kissed us all in her emotion, before she finally threw herself into the bear-hug of her husband.

“But they could not have been asleep!” cried Lord John.  “Dash it all, Challenger, you don’t mean to believe that those folk were asleep with their staring eyes and stiff limbs and that awful death grin on their faces!”

“It can only have been the condition that is called catalepsy,” said Challenger.  “It has been a rare phenomenon in the past and has constantly been mistaken for death.  While it endures, the temperature falls, the respiration disappears, the heartbeat is indistinguishable—­in fact, it is death, save that it is evanescent.  Even the most comprehensive mind”—­here he closed his eyes and simpered—­“could hardly conceive a universal outbreak of it in this fashion.”

“You may label it catalepsy,” remarked Summerlee, “but, after all, that is only a name, and we know as little of the result as we do of the poison which has caused it.  The most we can say is that the vitiated ether has produced a temporary death.”

Austin was seated all in a heap on the step of the car.  It was his coughing which I had heard from above.  He had been holding his head in silence, but now he was muttering to himself and running his eyes over the car.

“Young fat-head!” he grumbled.  “Can’t leave things alone!”

“What’s the matter, Austin?”

“Lubricators left running, sir.  Someone has been fooling with the car.  I expect it’s that young garden boy, sir.”

Lord John looked guilty.

“I don’t know what’s amiss with me,” continued Austin, staggering to his feet.  “I expect I came over queer when I was hosing her down.  I seem to remember flopping over by the step.  But I’ll swear I never left those lubricator taps on.”