alternated within him, chasing each other in and out of his
consciousness. He felt all the while that he, John Richards
Lapenotiere, a junior officer in His Majesty's service, was assisting
in one of the most momentous events in his country's history; and
alone in the room with these two men, he felt it as he had never
begun to feel it amid the smoke and roar of the actual battle.
He had seen the dead hero but half a dozen times in his life: he had
never been honoured by a word from him: but like every other naval
officer, he had come to look up to Nelson as to the splendid
particular star among commanders. _There_ was greatness: _there_ was
that which lifted men to such deeds as write man's name across the
firmament! And, strange to say, Lieutenant Lapenotiere recognised
something of it in this queer old man, in dressing-gown and
ill-fitting wig, who took snuff and interrupted now with a curse and
anon with a "bravo!" as the Secretary read. He was absurd: but he
was no common man, this Lord Barham. He had something of the
ineffable aura of greatness.

But in the Lieutenant's brain, across this serious, even awful sense
of the moment and of its meaning, there played a curious secondary
sense that the moment was not--that what was happening before his
eyes had either happened before or was happening in some vacuum in
which past, present, future and the ordinary divisions of time had
lost their bearings. The great twenty-four-hour clock at the end of
the Board Room, ticking on and on while the Secretary read, wore an
unfamiliar face. . . . Yes, time had gone wrong, somehow: and the
events of the passage home to Falmouth, of the journey up to the
doors of the Admiralty, though they ran on a chain, had no intervals
to be measured by a clock, but followed one another like pictures on
a wall. He saw the long, indigo-coloured swell thrusting the broken