make up this greater life? How is it with the common
lives? As it has ever been--sorrow and labour, lives

cramped and unfulfilled, lives tempted by power,
tempted by wealth, and gone to waste and folly. The

old faiths have faded and changed, the new faith--.
Is there a new faith? "

Things that he had long wished to believe, he found
that he believed. He plunged at belief and seized it,

and clung for a time at her level. He spoke gustily,
in broken incomplete sentences, but with all his heart

and strength, of this new faith within him. He spoke
of the greatness of self-abnegation, of his belief in an

immortal life of Humanity in which we live and move
and have our being. His voice rose and fell, and the

recording appliances hummed their hurried applause,
dim attendants watched him out of the shadow.

Through all those doubtful places his sense of that
silent spectator beside him sustained his sincerity.

For a few glorious moments he was carried away; he
felt no doubt of his heroic quality, no doubt of his

heroic words, he had it all straight and plain. His
eloquence limped no longer. And at last he made an

end to speaking. "Here and now," he cried, "I make
my will. All that is mine in the world I give to the

people of the world. All that is mine in the world I
give to the people of the world. I give it to you, and

myself I give to you. And as God wills, I will live for
you, or I will die."

He ended with a florid gesture and turned about.
He found the light of his present exaltation reflected

in the face of the girl. Their eyes met; her eyes were
swimming with tears of enthusiasm. They seemed to

be urged towards each other. They clasped hands
and stood gripped, facing one another, in an eloquent

silence. She whispered. "I knew," she whispered.
"I knew." He could not speak, he crushed her hand

in his. His mind was the theatre of gigantic passions.
The man in yellow was beside them. Neither had

noted his coming. He was saying that the south-west
wards were marching. "I never expected it so soon,"

he cried. "They have done wonders. You must send
them a word to help them on their way."

Graham dropped Helen's hand and stared at him
absent-mindedly. Then with a start he returned to

his previous preoccupation about the flying stages.
"Yes," he said. "That is good, that is good." He

weighed a message. "Tell them;--well done South
West."

He turned his eyes to Helen Wotton again. His
face expressed his struggle between conflicting ideas.

"We must capture the flying stages," he explained.
"Unless we can do that they will land negroes. At all

costs we must prevent that."
He felt even as he spoke that this was not what had

been in his mind before the interruption. He saw a
touch of surprise in her eyes. She seemed about to

speak and a shrill bell drowned her voice.
It occurred to Graham that she expected him to lead

these marching people, that that was the thing he had
to do. He made the offer abruptly. He addressed

the man in yellow, but he spoke to her. He saw her
face respond. "Here I am doing nothing," he said.

"It is impossible," protested the man in yellow.
"It is a fight in a warren. Your place is here."

He explained elaborately. He motioned towards
the room where Graham must wait, he insisted no other

course was possible. "We must know where you
are," he said. "At any moment a crisis may arise

needing your presence and decision. "The room was
a luxurious little apartment with news machines and

a broken mirror that had once been en __rapport__ with the
crow's nest specula. It seemed a matter of course to

Graham that Helen should stop with him.
A picture had drifted through his mind of such a

vast dramatic struggle as the masses in the ruins had
suggested. But here was no spectacular battle-field

such as he imagined. Instead was seclusion--and suspense.
It was only as the afternoon wore on that

he pieced together a truer picture of the fight that
was raging, inaudibly and invisibly, within four

miles of him, beneath the Roehampton stage. A
strange and unprecedentedcontest it was, a battle

that was a hundred thousand little battles, a battle
in a sponge of ways and channels, fought out

of sight of sky or sun under the electric glare,
fought out in a vast confusion by multitudes untrained

in arms, led chiefly by acclamation, multitudes
dulled by mindless labour and enervated by the

tradition of two hundred years of servile security
against multitudes demolised by lives of venial privilege

and sensual indulgence. They had no artillery,
no differentiation into this force or that; the only

weapon on either side was the little green metal
carbine, whose secret manufacture and sudden

distribution in enormous quantities had been one of Ostrog's
culminating moves against the Council. Few had had

any experience with this weapon, many had never
discharged one, many who carried it came unprovided

with ammunition; never was wilder firing in the
history of warfare. It was a battle of amateurs, a

hideous experimentalwarfare, armed rioters fighting
armed rioters, armed rioters swept forward by the

words and fury of a song, by the tramping sympathy
of their numbers, pouring in countless myriads

towards the smaller ways, the disabled lifts, the
galleries slippery with blood, the halls and passages

choked with smoke, beneath the flying stages, to learn
there when retreat was hopeless the ancient mysteries

of warfare. And overhead save for a few sharpshooters
upon the roof spaces and for a few bands and

threads of vapour that multiplied and darkened towards
the evening, the day was a clear serenity. Ostrog it

seems had no bombs at command and in all the earlier
phases of the battle the aeropiles played no part. Not

the smallest cloud was there to break the empty
brilliance of the sky. It seemed as though it held itself

vacant until the aeroplanes should come.
Ever and again there was news of these, drawing

nearer, from this Mediterranean port and then that,
and presently from the south of France. But of the

new guns that Ostrog had made and which were known
to be in the city came no news in spite of Graham's

urgency, nor any report of successes from the dense
felt of fighting strands about the flying stages.

Section after section of the Labour Societies reported itself
assembled, reported itself marching, and vanished from

knowledge into the labyrinth of that warfare What