They were within a yard of the professor, and still he did not move; only took the burning candle from the bottle, and railed at them as if they could hear. I thought that he had gone mad.
“Do you think man has learned nothing in his thousand generations?” he shouted. “That you can crush him with the brute strength of a few days? Come and see! Come and see!”
The foremost tentacle wound round him; began to lift him. He felt it carefully with his hands. “It is dry,” he shouted—“dry!”
Then he put the candle to it!
There was a wilderness of white light. Then a purple darkness. I heard the professor fall. When our eyes recovered from their dazed blindness the weed was utterly gone. The daylight was streaming into the hole in the wall, and the professor was picking himself up from the floor. His hair and beard were badly singed, and his eyebrows were gone.
“It dried too fast,” he told us, with a queer angry chuckle. “That was its weakness. It dried—dried——”
He kept on repeating the word in a dull, aimless tone. The rest repeated it vacantly after him. Viva was the first to speak coherently—a faint whisper in my ear.
“My dear!” she said. “My dear!”
Lady Evelyn spoke next—to ex-card sharper Steel.
“The world begins afresh,” she said; “and—you have met me, Mr. Steel.”