the staircases of the middle
path--at one place Graham saw an arsenal of the revolutionary committee
besieged by a crowd of shouting men, at another a couple of men in the
hated yellow uniform of the Labour Police, pursued by a gathering
crowd, fled precipitately along the swift way that went in the opposite
direction.

The cries of "To your Wards!" became at last a continuous shouting
as they drew near the Government quarter. Many of the shouts were
unintelligible. "Ostrog has betrayed us," one man bawled in a hoarse
voice, again and again, dinning that refrain into Graham's ear until
it haunted him. This person stayed close beside Graham and Asano on the
swift way, shouting to the people who swarmed on the lower platforms as
he rushed past them. His cry about Ostrog alternated with some
incomprehensible orders Presently he went leaping down and disappeared.

Graham's mind was filled with the din. His plans were vague and
unformed. He had one picture of some commanding position from which he
could address the multitudes, another of meeting Ostrog face to face. He
was full of rage, of tense muscular excitement, his hands gripped, his
lips were pressed together.

The way to the Council House across the ruins was impassable, but Asano
met that difficulty and took Graham into the premises of the central
post-office. The post-office was nominally at work, but the blue-clothed
porters moved sluggishly or had stopped to stare through the arches of
their galleries at the shouting men who were going by outside. "Every
man to his Ward! Every man to his Ward!" Here, by Asano's advice, Graham
revealed his identity.

They crossed to the Council House by a cable cradle. Already in the
brief interval since the capitulation of the Councillors a great change
had been wrought in the appearance of the ruins. The spurting cascades
of the ruptured sea water-mains had been captured and tamed, and huge
temporary pipes ran overhead along a flimsy looking fabric of girders.
The sky was laced with restored cables and wires that served the Council
House, and a mass of new fabric with cranes and other building machines
going to and fro upon it, projected to the left of the white pile.

The moving ways that ran across this area had been restored, albeit for
once running under the open sky. These were the ways that Graham had
seen from the little balcony in the hour of his awakening, not nine days
since, and the hall of his Trance had been on