He threw himself at last into a corner seat of his compartment, and conscious of a somewhat rare physical exhaustion, he rang the bell for the attendant and ordered refreshments.  The evening papers were by his side, but he had no fancy to read.  The thrill of the last few hours was still upon him.  He sat with folded arms, looking idly through the window at the chaotic prospect.  Suddenly he was aware that the door of his compartment had been opened.  A man had entered and was taking the seat opposite to him, a man whose appearance struck Maraton at once as being vaguely familiar, a man who smiled at him almost with the air of an old acquaintance.

“You don’t recognise me, I can see,” the newcomer said, smiling slightly, “yet we ought to know one another.”

Maraton looked at the intruder curiously.  It was, in many respects, a remarkable face; a low, heavy forehead; eyes in which shone the unmistakable light; broad, firm mouth; fair hair, left unusually long.  In figure the man was short and stout.  His collar had parted, and a black bow of unusual size was drooping from his shoulder.  He was slightly out of breath, too, as though he had but recently recovered from some strenuous exercise.

“I will save you from speculations—­I am Henry Selingman,” he pronounced.

Maraton held out his hand.

“Selingman!” he exclaimed.  “It is your photographs, of course, then.  We have never met.”

“Never until to-night,” Selingman admitted.  “When I heard that you were in England, I made up my mind to come over.  To-night seemed to me propitious.  I wanted to understand this marvellous power of yours of which so many people have written.  Nothing has been exaggerated.  The message which I have struggled to deliver to the world through my poetry, my plays, such prose as I have ventured upon, you yourself can tear from your heart and throw to the people’s own ears. . . .  Forgive me—­I, too, will smoke.  I will drink wine, also,” he added, ringing the bell.  “I had a dozen friends to help me, but every bone in my body aches with the struggle to escape.  You maddened them, those people.  It was magnificent.”

He ordered champagne from the attendant and began to smoke a long black cigar, nervously and quickly.

“To-night I shall write of this,” he went on.  “I have lived for forty-five years and I have hunted all over the world, and in my study I have conjured up all the visions a man may, but never yet has there been anything like this.  The black hillside a mass of soft black velvet, jewelled like a woman’s gown, the red fires from the blasting furnaces, the shower of sparks from a thousand torches, the glow upon the fog poisoned sky, those faces—­God, how white!  Never in my life have I seen the writing of the finger of the Messiah as I saw it to-night!  It has been the hour of a lifetime.  Maraton, over there, man, our toilers are toilers indeed, but not like that.  It isn’t stamped into them.  No, they’re not branded.”