social convulsion and darkness. Far off and high up he
presently saw a pallid light of a semi-circular shape. As he approached
this, a black edge came up and hid it. He stumbled at steps and found
himself in a gallery. He heard a sobbing, and found two scared little
girls crouched by a railing. These children became silent at the near
sound of feet. He tried to console them, but they were very still until
he left them. Then as he receded he could hear them sobbing again.

Presently he found himself at the foot of a staircase and near a wide
opening. He saw a dim twilight above this and ascended out of the
blackness into a street of moving Ways again. Along this a disorderly
swarm of people marched shouting. They were singing snatches of the song
of the revolt, most of them out of tune. Here and there torches flared
creating brief hysterical shadows. He asked his way and was twice
puzzled by that same thick dialect. His third attempt won an answer
he could understand. He was two miles from the wind-vane offices in
Westminster, but the way was easy to follow.

When at last he did approach the district of the wind-vane offices it
seemed to him, from the cheering processions that came marching along
the Ways, from the tumult of rejoicing, and finally from the restoration
of the lighting of the city, that the overthrow of the Council must
already be accomplished. And still no news of his absence came to his
ears.

The re-illumination of the city came with startling abruptness. Suddenly
he stood blinking, all about him men halted dazzled, and the world was
incandescent. The light found him already upon the outskirts of the
excited crowds that choked the Ways near the wind-vane offices, and the
sense of visibility and exposure that came with it turned his colourless
intention of joining Ostrog to a keen anxiety.

For a time he was jostled, obstructed, and endangered by men hoarse and
weary with cheering his name, some of them bandaged and bloody in his
cause. The frontage of the wind-vane offices was illuminated by some
moving picture, but what it was he could not see, because in spite
of his strenuous attempts the density of the crowd prevented his
approaching it. From the fragments of speech he caught, he judged it
conveyed news of the fighting about the Council House. Ignorance and
indecision made him slow and ineffective in his movements. For a time he
could not conceive how he was to get within the unbroken facade of