“It is just as you described it,” he murmured. “I can see the tabletop. Did you look inside when you had got out?” It had not occurred to Jeremy, and he admitted it. “Never mind,” the young man went on, “we’ll do that in a moment.” Then he made Jeremy explain to him how the warehouse had stood, where Lime Court had been, and how it fell into the side street. He paced the ground which was indicated to him with serious absorbed face, and said at last: “You understand that I haven’t doubted what you told me. I felt that you were speaking the truth. But you might have been deluded, and it was as much for your own sake....”

Jeremy interrupted him eagerly. “Couldn’t you get the old records, or an old map of London that would show where all these things were? That would help to prove the truth of what I say.”

The young man shook his head doubtfully. “I don’t suppose I could,” he answered vaguely, his eyes straying off in another direction. “I never heard of such things. Now for this....” And turning to the crevice again he seized the tabletop and with a vigorous effort wrenched it up. As he did so a rat ran squeaking from underneath, and scampered away across the grass. Jeremy started back bewildered.

“You had a pleasant bedfellow,” said the young man in his grave manner. Jeremy was silent, struggling with something in his memory that had been overlaid by more recent concerns. Was it possible that he was not alone in this unfamiliar generation? With a sudden movement he jumped down into the open grave and began to search in the loose dust at the bottom. The next moment he was out again, presenting for the inspection of his bewildered companion an oddly-shaped glass vessel.

“This is it!” he cried, his face white, his eyes blazing, “I told you I came to see an experiment——” Then he was checked by the perfect blankness of the expression that met him. “Of course,” he said more slowly, “if you’re not a scientist, perhaps you wouldn’t know what this is.” And he began to explain, in the simplest words he could find, the astonishing theory that had just leapt up fully born in his brain. He guessed, staggered by his own supposition, that Trehanoc’s ray had been more potent than even the discoverer had suspected, and that welling softly and invisibly from the once excited vacuum-tube which he held in his hand, it had preserved him and the rat together in a state of suspended animation for more than a century and a half. Then with the rolling of the timbers over his head and the collapse of the soft earth which had gathered on them, the air had entered the hermetically sealed chamber and brought awakening with it.

As his own excitement began to subside he was checked again by the absolute lack of comprehension patent in his companion’s face. He stopped in the middle of a sentence, feeling himself all astray. Was this ray one of the commonplaces of the new age? Was it his surprise, rather than the cause of it, which was so puzzling to his friend? The whole world was swimming around him, and ideas began to lose their connection. But, as through a mist, he could still see the young man’s face, and hear him saying seriously as ever:

“I do not understand how that bottle could have kept you asleep for so long, nor do I know what you mean by a ray. You are very ill, or you would not try to explain things which cannot be explained. You do not know any more than I what special grace has preserved you. Many strange things happened in the old times which we cannot understand to-day.” As he spoke he crossed himself and bowed his head. Jeremy was silenced by his expression of devout and final certainty, and stifled the exclamation that rose to his lips.

CHAPTER IV
DISCOVERIES

1

HOW and when Jeremy’s second unconsciousness overtook him he did not know. He remembered stumbling after his friend down the uneven road he had now begun to hate. He remembered that the heat of the day had grown intense, that his own dizziness had increased, and that he had been falling wearily over stones and from one rut to another. He had a dim recollection of entering the street he had seen before, and of noticing the odd effect produced by twentieth-century buildings sagging crazily forward over a rough cobbled roadway. But he did not remember his sudden collapse, or how his friend had secured a cart and anxiously bundled him into it. He did not remember the jolting journey that followed, as speedy as the streets of this new London would allow.