ve
it, and men whose love is returned by a woman unexpectedly, and men
whose sins are forgiven them. Everything his eye fell on it feasted on,
not aesthetically, but with a plain, jolly appetite as of a boy eating
buns. He relished the squareness of the houses; he liked their clean
angles as if he had just cut them with a knife. The lit squares of the
shop windows excited him as the young are excited by the lit stage of
some promising pantomime. He happened to see in one shop which projected
with a bulging bravery on to the pavement some square tins of potted
meat, and it seemed like a hint of a hundred hilarious high teas in a
hundred streets of the world. He was, perhaps, the happiest of all the
children of men. For in that unendurable instant when he hung, half
slipping, to the ball of St. Paul's, the whole universe had been
destroyed and re-created.

Suddenly through all the din of the dark streets came a crash of glass.
With that mysterious suddenness of the Cockney mob, a rush was made
in the right direction, a dingy office, next to the shop of the potted
meat. The pane of glass was lying in splinters about the pavement. And
the police already had their hands on a very tall young man, with dark,
lank hair and dark, dazed eyes, with a grey plaid over his shoulder, who
had just smashed the shop window with a single blow of his stick.

"I'd do it again," said the young man, with a furious white face.
"Anybody would have done it. Did you see what it said? I swear I'd do it
again." Then his eyes encountered the monkish habit of Michael, and he
pulled off his grey tam-o'-shanter with the gesture of a Catholic.

"Father, did you see what they said?" he cried, trembling. "Did you see
what they dared to say? I didn't understand it at first. I read it half
through before I broke the window."

Michael felt he knew not how. The whole peace of the world was pent up
painfully in his heart. The new and childlike world which he had seen
so suddenly, men had not seen at all. Here they were still at their old
bewildering, pardonable, useless quarrels, with so much to be said on
both sides, and so little that need be said at all. A fierce inspiration
fell on him suddenly; he would strike them where they stood with the
love of God. They should not move till they saw their own sweet and
startling existence. They should not go from that place till they went
home embracing like brothers and shouting like men delivered. From the
Cros