m quite decided."

Ostrog, after a pause, decided not to speak, and bowed deferentially.

CHAPTER XX. IN THE CITY WAYS

And that night, unknown and unsuspected, Graham, dressed in the costume
of an inferior wind-vane official keeping holiday, and accompanied by
Asano in Labour Company canvas, surveyed the city through which he
had wandered when it was veiled in darkness. But now he saw it lit and
waking, a whirlpool of life. In spite of the surging and swaying of the
forces of revolution, in spite of the unusual discontent, the mutterings
of the greater struggle of which the first revolt was but the prelude,
the myriad streams of commerce still flowed wide and strong. He knew now
something of the dimensions and quality of the new age, but he was not
prepared for the infinite surprise of the detailed view, for the torrent
of colour and vivid impressions that poured past him.

This was his first real contact with the people of these latter days.
He realised that all that had gone before, saving his glimpses of the
public theatres and markets, had had its element of seclusion, had been
a movement within the comparatively narrow political quarter, that all
his previous experiences had revolved immediately about the question of
his own position. But here was the city at the busiest hours of night,
the people to a large extent returned to their own immediate interests,
the resumption of the real informal life, he common habits of the new
time.

They emerged at first into a street whose opposite ways were crowded
with the blue canvas liveries. This swarm Graham saw was a portion of a
procession--it was odd to see a procession parading the city seated They
carried banners of coarse red stuff with red letters. "No disarmament,"
said the banners, for the most part in crudely daubed letters and
with variant spelling, and "Why should we disarm?" "No disarming." "No
disarming." Banner after banner went by, a stream of banners flowing
past, and at last at the end, the song of the revolt and a noisy band of
strange instruments. "They all ought to be at work," said Asano. "They
have had no food these two days, or they have stolen it."

Presently Asano made a detour to avoid the congested crowd that gaped
upon the occasional passage of dead bodies from hospital to a mortuary,
the gleanings after death's harvest of the first revolt.

That night few people were sleeping, everyone was abroad. A vast
excitement, perpetual crowds