"Listen," said Peter again; and some far off thing was faintly jarring
the soft silence, on a crescendo note.

Rodney listened, and murmured, "Brute." He hated them more than Peter
did. He was less wide-minded and less sweet-tempered. Peter had a gentle
and not intolerant æsthetic aversion, Rodney a fervid moral indignation.

It came storming over the rims of twilight out of an unborn dawn, and the
soft dust surged behind. Its eyes flamed, and lit the pale world. It was
running to the city in the dim west; it was in a hurry; it would be there
for breakfast. As it ran it played the opening bars of something of
Tchaichowsky's.

Rodney and Peter leant over the low white wall and gazed into grey
shivering gardens. So could they show aloof contempt; so could they
elude the rioting dust.

The storming took a diminuendo note; it slackened to a throbbing murmur.
The brute had stopped, and close to them. The brute was investigating
itself.

"Perhaps," Rodney hoped, but not sanguinely, "they'll have to push it all
the way to Florence." Still contempt withheld a glance.

Then a pleasant, soft voice broke the hushed dusk with half a laugh, and
Peter wheeled sharply about. The man who had laughed was climbing again
into his seat, saying, "It's quite all right." That remark was extremely
characteristic; it would have been a suitable motto for his whole career.

The next thing he said, in his gentle, unsurprised voice, was to the