When the electric lights shed a sudden bright glare down the spiral staircase, Sir Guy cowered and stopped short again, turning pale with a fear irrepressible. But Phoebe put one arm about his neck and drew his head down to hers, whispering in his ear. What she said none heard save him, but the spell of her words was potent, for the young knight stood erect once more and firmly ascended to the room above.
Droop stood nervously waiting at the engine-room door.
"Are ye all in?" he said, sharply. "Where's Cousin Rebecca?"
"Here I be!" came a voice from below. "I'm jest lockin' the door tight."
"Well, hurry up--hurry! Come up here an' lay down. I'm goin' to start."
In a few moments all was in readiness. Droop pulled the lever, and with a roar and a mighty bound the Panchronicon, revived by its long period of waiting, sped upward into the night.
As the four fugitives sat upright again, and Droop, rubbing his hands with satisfaction, was about to speak, the door of one of the bedchambers was opened, and a stranger dressed in nineteenth-century attire stepped forward, shading his blinking eyes with his hand.
The two women screamed, but Droop only dropped amazed into a chair.
Then, leaping forward eagerly, he cried aloud:
Of the return trip of the five, little need be said save to record one untoward incident which has been the occasion of a most unfortunate historic controversy.
The date-recording instrument must have been deranged in some way, for when, after a great number of eastward turns around the pole, it marked the year 1898, they had really only reached 1857. Supposing themselves to have actually reached the year erroneously indicated by the recorder, they set off southward and made a first landing in Hartford, Connecticut.
Here they discovered their mistake, and returned to the pole to complete their journey in time. All but Francis Bacon. He declared that so much whirling made him giddy, and remained in Connecticut. Alas! Had Phoebe known the result of this desertion, she would never have consented to it.
Bacon, who had read much of Shakespeare while in the Panchronicon, found on returning thus accidentally to modern America, that this playwright was esteemed the first and greatest of poets and dramatists by the modern world. Then and there he planned a conspiracy to rob the greatest character in literary history of his just fame; and, under the pseudonym of "Delia Bacon," advanced those theories of his own concealed authorship which have ever since deluded the uncritical and disgusted all lovers of common-sense and of justice.