nd cables was a faint interrupted
ribbon of pallid sky. A number of people hurried by. From their shouts
and voices, it seemed they were hurrying to join the fighting. Other
less noisy figures flitted timidly among the shadows.

From very far away down the street he could hear the sound of a
struggle. But it was evident to him that this was not the street into
which the theatre opened. That former fight, it seemed, had suddenly
dropped out of sound and hearing. And--grotesque thought!--they were
fighting for him!

For a space he was like a man who pauses in the reading of a vivid book,
and suddenly doubts what he has been taking unquestioningly. At that
time he had little mind for details; the whole effect was a huge
astonishment. Oddly enough, while the flight from the Council prison,
the great crowd in the hall, and the attack of the red police upon the
swarming people were clearly present in his mind, it cost him an effort
to piece in his awakening and to revive the meditative interval of the
Silent Rooms. At first his memory leapt these things and took him back
to the cascade at Pentargen quivering in the wind, and all the sombre
splendours of the sunlit Cornish coast. The contrast touched everything
with unreality. And then the gap filled, and he began to comprehend his
position.

It was no longer absolutely a riddle, as it had been in the Silent
Rooms. At least he had the strange, bare outline now. He was in some way
the owner of half the world, and great political parties were fighting
to possess him. On the one hand was the White Council, with its red
police, set resolutely, it seemed, on the usurpation of his property and
perhaps his murder; on the other, the revolution that had liberated him,
with this unseen "Ostrog" as its leader. And the whole of this gigantic
city was convulsed by their struggle. Frantic development of his
world! "I do not understand," he cried. "I do not understand!"

He had slipped out between the contending parties into this liberty of
the twilight. What would happen next? What was happening? He figured
the redclad men as busily hunting him, driving the blackbadged
revolutionists before them.

At any rate chance had given him a breathing space. He could lurk
unchallenged by the passers-by, and watch the course of things. His eye
followed up the intricate dim immensity of the twilight buildings, and
it came to him as a thing infinitely wonderful, that above there the
sun was rising