the only thing left--sanity. But there was just enough in him of
the blood of these fanatics to make even his protest for common
sense a little too fierce to be sensible. His hatred of modern
lawlessness had been crowned also by an accident. It happened that
he was walking in a side street at the instant of a dynamite
outrage. He had been blind and deaf for a moment, and then seen,
the smoke clearing, the broken windows and the bleeding faces.
After that he went about as usual--quiet, courteous, rather gentle;
but there was a spot on his mind that was not sane. He did not
regard anarchists, as most of us do, as a handful of morbid men,
combining ignorance with intellectualism. He regarded them as a
huge and pitiless peril, like a Chinese invasion.

He poured perpetually into newspapers and their waste-paper baskets
a torrent of tales, verses and violent articles, warning men of
this deluge of barbaric denial. But he seemed to be getting no
nearer his enemy, and, what was worse, no nearer a living. As he
paced the Thames embankment, bitterly biting a cheap cigar and
brooding on the advance of Anarchy, there was no anarchist with
a bomb in his pocket so savage or so solitary as he. Indeed, he
always felt that Government stood alone and desperate, with its
back to the wall. He was too quixotic to have cared for it
otherwise.

He walked on the Embankment once under a dark red sunset. The red
river reflected the red sky, and they both reflected his anger. The
sky, indeed, was so swarthy, and the light on the river relatively
so lurid, that the water almost seemed of fiercer flame than the
sunset it mirrored. It looked like a stream of literal fire winding
under the vast caverns of a subterranean country.