wanted another
bird's-eye view before I could understand properly: I am so grateful to
you for giving it me. It is really a great labour, this daily letter to
the Cardinal-Protector. I am thinking of resigning if I am allowed."

"My dear father, don't do that. If I may say so to your face, I think
you have a very shrewd mind; and unless Rome has balanced information
she can do nothing. I don't suppose your colleagues are as careful as
yourself."

Percy smiled, lifting his dark eyebrows deprecatingly.

"Come, father," he said.

* * * * *

The two priests parted at the steps of the corridor, and Percy stood for
a minute or two staring out at the familiar autumn scene, trying to
understand what it all meant. What he had heard downstairs seemed
strangely to illuminate that vision of splendid prosperity that lay
before him.

The air was as bright as day; artificial sunlight had carried all before
it, and London now knew no difference between dark and light. He stood
in a kind of glazed cloister, heavily floored with a preparation of
rubber on which footsteps made no sound. Beneath him, at the foot of the
stairs, poured an endless double line of persons severed by a partition,
going to right and left, noiselessly, except for the murmur of Esperanto
talking that sounded ceaselessly as they went. Through the clear,
hardened glass of the public passage showed a broad sleek black roadway,
ribbed from side to side, and puckered in the centre, significantly
empty, but even as he stood there a note sounded far away from Old
Westminster, like the hum of a giant hive, rising as it came, and an
instant later a transparent thing shot past, flashing from every angle,
and the note died to a hum again and a silence as the great Government
motor from the south whirled eastwards with the mails. This was a
privileged roadway; nothing but state-vehicles were allowed to use it,
and those at a speed not exceeding one hundred miles an hour.

Other noises were subdued in this city of rubber; the passenger-circles
were a hundred yards away, and the subterranean traffic lay too deep for
anything but a vibration to make itself felt. It was to remove this
vibration, and silence the hum of the ordinary vehicles, that the
Government experts had been working for the last twenty years.

Once again before he moved there came a long cry from overhead,
startlingly beautiful and piercing, and, as he lifted his eyes from the
glimpse of the steady riv