midnight
* * * * * There was an instant 's silence . He stood there , his hands clasped in agony upon his cross . Then he flung his hands wide in sudden , silent appeal . There was a crash of an overturned desk ; the crying out of desperate voices all together , and as from the great tower overhead there beat out the first stroke of midnight , the priest , on his knees now , saw through eyes blind with tears , figures moving and falling and kneeling towards that central form that stood there , a white pillar of Royalty and sorrow , calling for the last time all the world unto him . * * * * * But the President sat still at his desk , motionless . The sight on which the watcher 's eyes rested , as he sat , hung here in motionlessness above Westminster , a hundred feet higher than the great St. Edward 's Tower itself , was one not only undreamed of , but even inconceivable to men of earlier days . For it seemed as if some vast invisible air-way had been flung straight from the midst of London , down away to the south-west horizon , where it ran into the faint summer haze thirty miles away .