thinking, by that new light that
had flashed upon him.

It was January, the London January of whirling dust clouds below, and
racing, murky vapours above. They had been settled in the Harley Street
house four months. It seemed to Saxham as though they had lived there for
years. The routine of professional life was closing in upon him once
again. Patients thronged to his door; Hospitals, and Societies, and
Institutions were open to him as of old; Society courted and flattered
him, and gushed about the beauty of Mrs. Saxham. It was as though that
celebrated Criminal Case, The Crown _v._ Saxham, had never developed into
ugly, sinister shape under the dirty skylight of the Old Bailey.

He crossed Grosvenor Square, and turned down Brook Street, thinking as he
went. Pretty women in furs, their make-up subdued by silk-gauze veils,
nodded to him from motor-broughams and victorias.

Though the horse-drawn hansom yet plied for hire, petrol was driving
brute-power off the streets. The hooting and clanking of the motor-omnibus
made Oxford Street hideous. And that St. Vitus's Dance of the Tube Railway
swept under the pavement beneath Saxham's tread as he had passed up New
Bond Street. Certainly London was not more beautiful or pleasanter to live
in for the six years that had gone by.

The Tube Works were responsible for much. The Companies were linking up
the North with the West, and strings of trolleys, coupled together like
railway-trucks, and laden with yellow clay or great balks of timber, or
giant scales of bored armour-plating, or moleskin-clad, brawny navvies,
progressed incessantly and at all hours through the thoroughfares of the
metropolis behind huge, giraffe-necked, splay-wheeled, smoke-vomiting
traction-engines. Houses and other buildings were being pulled down to
make stations; great hoardings were up, enclosing spaces where work went
on all day, amidst clankings and groanings of machinery, and clouds of
oily-smelling steam, and where work went on all night, with more groanings
and more clankings, deplorable shrieks of steam-sirens and hellish flares
that might have been reflections from a burning Tophet, cast upon yet
bigger and denser clouds of the oily-smelling steam.

Yes! the big black opulent city was greatly changed. But the change in the
people, affecting all ranks and every class, was even greater. There were
compensations, if you could balance against the decay of good manners the
improvements in sanitati