for all the world like an archbishop in a book, and it came down
in the Fulham Road within three yards of a 'bus horse. It stood
for a second perhaps, astonishing and in its attitude astonished,
then it crumpled, shivered into pieces, and the 'bus horse was
incidentally killed.

Filmer lost the end of the archiepiscopal compliment. He stood up
and stared as his invention swooped out of sight and reach of him.
His long, white hands still gripped his useless apparatus.
The archbishop followed his skyward stare with an apprehension
unbecoming in an archbishop.

Then came the crash and the shouts and uproar from the road
to relieve Filmer's tension. "My God!" he whispered, and sat down.

Every one else almost was staring to see where the machine had
vanished, or rushing into the house.

The making of the big machine progressed all the more rapidly
for this. Over its making presided Filmer, always a little slow
and very careful in his manner, always with a growing preoccupation
in his mind. His care over the strength and soundness of the apparatus
was prodigious. The slightest doubt, and he delayed everything
until the doubtful part could be replaced. Wilkinson, his senior
assistant, fumed at some of these delays, which, he insisted, were
for the most part unnecessary. Banghurst magnified the patient
certitude of Filmer in the New Paper, and reviled it bitterly
to his wife, and MacAndrew, the second assistant, approved Filmer's
wisdom. "We're not wanting a fiasco, man," said MacAndrew. "He's
perfectly well advised."