Then I returned through the pine wood, neck-high with red weed here

and there, to find the landlord of the Spotted Dog had already found

burial, and so came home past the College Arms. A man standing at an

open cottage door greeted me by name as I passed.

I looked at my house with a quick flash of hope that faded

immediately. The door had been forced; it was unfast and was opening

slowly as I approached.

It slammed again. The curtains of my study fluttered out of the

open window from which I and the artilleryman had watched the dawn. No

one had closed it since. The smashed bushes were just as I had left

them nearly four weeks ago. I stumbled into the hall, and the house

felt empty. The stair carpet was ruffled and discoloured where I had

crouched, soaked to the skin from the thunderstorm the night of the

catastrophe. Our muddy footsteps I saw still went up the stairs.

I followed them to my study, and found lying on my writing-table

still, with the selenite paper weight upon it, the sheet of work I had

left on the afternoon of the opening of the cylinder. For a space I

stood reading over my abandoned arguments. It was a paper on the

probable development of Moral Ideas with the development of the

civilising process; and the last sentence was the opening of a

prophecy: "In about two hundred years," I had written, "we may

expect----" The sentence ended abruptly. I remembered my inability

254

The War of the Worlds