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 river which alone had refused to be transformed,
he saw high above him against the heavy illuminated clouds, a long
slender object, glowing with soft light, slide northwards and vanish on
outstretched wings. That musical cry, he told himself, was the voice of
one of the European line of volors announcing its arrival in the capital
of Great Britain.

"Until our Lord comes back," he thought to himself; and for an instant
the old misery stabbed at his heart. How difficult it was to hold the
eyes focussed on that far horizon when this world lay in the foreground
so compelling in its splendour and its strength! Oh, he had argued with
Father Francis an hour ago that size was not the same as greatness, and
that an insistent external could not exclude a subtle internal; and he
had believed what he had then said; but the doubt yet remained till he
silenced it by a fierce effort, crying in his heart to the Poor Man of