bating now with
their faces closer together, and almost uniformly grave, save when for
an instant the smile of the Secretary ran aslant across his face as
the jagged lightning runs aslant across the sky. But there was one
persistent thing which first troubled Syme and at last terrified him.
The President was always looking at him, steadily, and with a great and
baffling interest. The enormous man was quite quiet, but his blue eyes
stood out of his head. And they were always fixed on Syme.

Syme felt moved to spring up and leap over the balcony. When the
President's eyes were on him he felt as if he were made of glass. He had
hardly the shred of a doubt that in some silent and extraordinary way
Sunday had found out that he was a spy. He looked over the edge of
the balcony, and saw a policeman, standing abstractedly just beneath,
staring at the bright railings and the sunlit trees.

Then there fell upon him the great temptation that was to torment him
for many days. In the presence of these powerful and repulsive men,
who were the princes of anarchy, he had almost forgotten the frail and
fanciful figure of the poet Gregory, the mere aesthete of anarchism.
He even thought of him now with an old kindness, as if they had played
together when children. But he remembered that he was still tied to
Gregory by a great promise. He had promised never to do the very thing
that he now felt himself almost in the act of doing. He had promised not
to jump over that balcony and speak to that policeman. He took his cold
hand off the cold stone balustrade. His soul swayed in a vertigo of
moral indecision. He had only to snap the thread of a rash vow made to
a villainous society, and all his life could be as open and sunny as
the square beneath him. He had, on the other hand, only to keep his
antiquated honour, and be delivered inch by inch into the power of this
great enemy of mankind, whose very intellect was a torture-chamber.
Whenever he looked down into the square he saw the comfortable
policeman, a pillar of common sense and common order. Whenever he looked
back at the breakfast-table he saw the President still quietly studying
him with big, unbearable eyes.

In all the torrent of his thought there were two thoughts that never
crossed his mind. First, it never occurred to him to doubt that the
President and his Council could crush him if he continued to stand
alone. The place might be public, the project might seem impossible.
But