from a paper, and, round the hill, derisively dancing, were many
undergraduates. Apparently the Proctor found the situation too difficult
for him and presently he disappeared. Bunning watched him, apprehension
and a sense of order struggling' with a desire for adventure. "They've
gone to fetch the police. There'll be an awful row."

There probably would be because that moment had at last been reached
when authority was flung absolutely to the winds of heaven. The world
seemed, in a moment, to have gone mad. Take Bunning, his cheeks
flushed, his body shaking, his eyes flaming, for an example. Olva, dark,
motionless in his shadow, watched it all and waited for his moment. He
knew that it was coming. Grimly he addressed the Shadow, now close to
his very heart. "I know you. You are urging me on. This night is your
business. . . . But I am fighting you still! I am fighting you still!"

The moment came. Bunning, clutching on to Olva's sleeve, whispered, "The
police! Even at that crisis of intensest excitement he could be seen,
nervously, pushing his spectacles up his nose. A surging crowd of men,
and Olva again fancied that he caught sight of Craven, swept towards
the row of timid twinkling lights with their neat little gardens like
trembling protests laid out before them. More wood! more wood! to
appease that great flaming monster that shot tongues of fire now to the
very heavens. More wood! more wood!"

"Look out, the police!"

They came, with their truncheons, in a line down the Common. Olva was
flung into the heart of a heaving mass of legs and arms. He caught a
glimpse of Bunning behind and he thought that he saw Craven a little to
his right. He did not know--he did not care. His blood was up at last.
He was shouting he knew not what, he was hitting out with his fists.
Men's voices about him--"Let go, you beast." "My God, I'll finish you."
"There goes a bobby." "Stamp on him!"

A disgraceful scene. The policemen were hopelessly outnumbered. The
crowd broke on to the line of orderly little gardens, water was
poured from windows, the palings were flung to the ground--glass
broken--screams of women somewhere in the distance.

But even now Olva knew that his moment had not come. Then some one
shouted in his ear--"Town cads! They're murdering a bobby!" He was
caught with several other men (of their number was Bunning) off the
Common up a side street.

A blazing lamp showed him an angry, shouting, jeering crowd; figure