The waiter downstairs had spoken quite correctly when he said that they were talking about bombs and kings.

Only three days afterwards the Czar was to meet the President of the French Republic in Paris, and over their bacon and eggs upon their sunny balcony these beaming gentlemen had decided how both should die.

Even the instrument was chosen; the black-bearded Marquis, it appeared, was to carry the bomb.
Ordinarily speaking, the proximity of this positive and objective crime would have sobered Syme, and cured him of all his merely mystical tremors.

He would have thought of nothing but the need of saving at least two human bodies from being ripped in pieces with iron and roaring gas.

But the truth was that by this time he had begun to feel a third kind of fear, more piercing and practical than either his moral revulsion or his social responsibility.