in the outburst and apparently died almost instantly.

The second man, however, dashed into the office. The Mohawk moved forward a few feet and three more bombs fell in quick succession, right on the roof of the shed. Then, her work done, she rose high into the air and Dick and Yvette watched the results.

The shed below them was already a furnace. Apparently there must have been some petrol tanks there, for no ordinary building could have burned so furiously. In a few minutes nothing remained but a heap of glowing embers.

Dick watched keenly for the man who had run into the office, but he never reappeared, and it was evident that, trapped by the flames, he had been unable to get out in time, and had perished. Dick little suspected at the time how important the fate of that man was to prove.

Then Dick set the Mohawk at top speed for home. Just as dawn was breaking Verdun loomed ahead. Yvette was saved.

Two days later the Berliner Tageblatt told how the famous scientist, Professor Zingler, had perished in a fire which had destroyed his laboratory at Spandau. The fire was attributed to an explosion of petrol on the professor’s aeroplane which had set light to the office. Unfortunately, the paper added, all the professor’s valuable papers and books had been lost.

The secret of the Zingler aeroplane had perished, and the seven dots were never heard again.

Chapter Four.

The Sorcerer of Soho.

“Unless we can solve this terrible mystery in the course of a few weeks, it is hardly too much to say that England is doomed.”

The speaker was the white-haired Professor Durward, the distinguished head of the Royal Society. He sat facing the Prime Minister in the latter’s room at 10, Downing Street. Round the long table were grouped the members of the Cabinet. They were men who had lived through stormy and troublous times and had met stories of disaster without flinching. But, as they admitted afterwards, none of the terrible tidings of past years, when the fortunes of the Empire seemed to be tottering, had affected them to the same extent as the few brief words with which the distinguished savant summed up the long deliberations on which they had been engaged. They seemed pregnant with the very message of Fate. 

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