midnight
He went back to the Grand and got his portmanteau and Gladstone bag and returned to Westbourne Terrace in time for afternoon tea . Meanwhile , he had bought the early copies of all the evening papers and read up the condition of things in London , which , in the light of his experiences at Portsmouth , did not appear to him to be in any way promising . He gave Norah and her aunt a full , true and particular account of the assault on Portsmouth , the doings of the _ Ithuriel _ , the great Fleet action , and the brilliant _ ruse de guerre _ which Admiral Beresford had used to capture the First French Army Corps that had landed in England -- and landed as prisoners . The news in the afternoon papers , coupled with what he already knew of the tactics of the enemy , impressed Lennard so gravely that he succeeded in persuading Mrs O'Connor and Norah to leave London by the midnight sleeping-car train from St Pancras for Whernside , since no one knew at what time during the night John Castellan or his lieutenants might not order an indiscriminate bombardment of London from the air . He was also very anxious , for reasons of his own , to get back to his work at the observatory and make his preparations for the carrying out of an undertaking compared with which the war , terrible as it was and would be , could only be considered as the squabblings of children or lunatics . His task was not one of aggression or conquest , but of salvation , and the enemy he was going to fight was an invader not of states or countries , but of a whole world , and unless the assault of this invader from the outer wilderness of Space were repelled , the result would not be merely the destruction of ships and fortresses , or the killing of a few hundreds or thousands of men on the battlefield ; it would mean nothing less than a holocaust which would involve the whole human race , and the simultaneous annihilation of all that the genius of man had so laboriously accumulated during the slow , uncounted ages of his progress from the brute to the man . They left the train at Settle at six o'clock the next morning , and were at once taken charge of by the station-master , who had had his instructions by telephone from the Parmenter mansion on the slopes of Great Whernside .