There was no spare bedroom in that little flat, but the dear old lady had actually made up a bed for me on a couch in the drawing-room, and before she retired for the night she made me free of the bathroom, and supplied me with towels and such like matters, and gave me cake and cocoa; a delicious repast I thought it. And so, while crushed and beaten London lay sleeping off its exhaustion, I slept under Constance Grey's roof, full of gratitude, and of a kind of new hope and gladness, very foreign, one would have said, to my gruesome experiences of the past forty-eight hours.
England, the old victorious island kingdom, bequeathed to us by Raleigh, Drake, Nelson; the nineteenth-century England of triumphant commercialism; England till then inviolate for a thousand years; rich and powerful beyond all other lands; broken now under the invader's heel—that ancient England slept.
PART II
THE AWAKENING
Exoriare aliquis de nostris ex ossibus ultor.—Virgil.
I
THE FIRST DAYS
The river glideth at his own sweet will.
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!