“What’s wrong?” said I.

“I say,” he said, in his full deliberate tones, straining round to see me and showing a profile, a well-modeled nose, a sensitive, clumsy, big lip, known to every caricaturist in the world, “I’m in a fix.  I fell and wrenched my ankle.  Where are you?”

I walked round him and stood looking at his face.  I perceived he had his gaiter and sock and boot off, the motor gauntlets had been cast aside, and he was kneading the injured part in an exploratory manner with his thick thumbs.

“By Jove!” I said, “you’re Melmount!”

“Melmount!” He thought.  “That’s my name,” he said, without looking up. . . .  “But it doesn’t affect my ankle.”

We remained silent for few moments except for a grunt of pain from him.

“Do you know?” I asked, “what has happened to things?”

He seemed to complete his diagnosis.  “It’s not broken,” he said.

“Do you know,” I repeated, “what has happened to everything?”

“No,” he said, looking up at me incuriously for the first time.

“There’s some difference------”

“There’s a difference.”  He smiled, a smile of unexpected pleasantness, and an interest was coming into his eyes.  “I’ve been a little preoccupied with my own internal sensations.  I remark an extraordinary brightness about things.  Is that it?”

“That’s part of it.  And a queer feeling, a clear-headedness------”

He surveyed me and meditated gravely.  “I woke up,” he said, feeling his way in his memory.

“And I.”

“I lost my way—­I forget quite how.  There was a curious green fog.”  He stared at his foot, remembering.  “Something to do with a comet.  I was by a hedge in the darkness.  Tried to run. . . .  Then I must have pitched into this lane.  Look!” He pointed with his head.  “There’s a wooden rail new broken there.  I must have stumbled over that out of the field above.”  He scrutinized this and concluded.  “Yes. . . .”

“It was dark,” I said, “and a sort of green gas came out of nothing everywhere.  That is the last I remember.”

“And then you woke up?  So did I. . . .  In a state of great bewilderment.  Certainly there’s something odd in the air.  I was—­I was rushing along a road in a motor-car, very much excited and preoccupied.  I got down——­” He held out a triumphant finger.  “Ironclads!”

“Now I’ve got it!  We’d strung our fleet from here to Texel.  We’d got right across them and the Elbe mined.  We’d lost the Lord Warden.  By Jove, yes.  The Lord Warden!  A battleship that cost two million pounds—­and that fool Rigby said it didn’t matter!  Eleven hundred men went down. . . .  I remember now.  We were sweeping up the North Sea like a net, with the North Atlantic fleet waiting at the Faroes for ’em—­and not one of ’em had three days’ coal!  Now, was that a dream?  No!  I told a lot of people as much—­a meeting was it?—­to reassure them.  They were warlike but extremely