He gradually grew calmer by dint of walking—­aimless, fast walking, with a rapt expression of the eyes that on crowded pavements cleared the way for him more effectually than a shouting footman.  And then he debouched unexpectedly on to the Embankment.  Dusk was already falling on the noble curve of the Thames, and the mighty panorama stretched before him in a manner mysteriously impressive which has made poets of less poetic men than Priam Farll.  Grand hotels, offices of millionaires and of governments, grand hotels, swards and mullioned windows of the law, grand hotels, the terrific arches of termini, cathedral domes, houses of parliament, and grand hotels, rose darkly around him on the arc of the river, against the dark violet murk of the sky.  Huge trams swam past him like glass houses, and hansoms shot past the trams and automobiles past the hansoms; and phantom barges swirled down on the full ebb, threading holes in bridges as cotton threads a needle.  It was London, and the roar of London, majestic, imperial, super-Roman.  And lo! earlier than the earliest municipal light, an unseen hand, the hand of destiny, printed a writing on the wall of vague gloom that was beginning to hide the opposite bank.  And the writing said that Shipton’s tea was the best.  And then the hand wiped largely out that message and wrote in another spot that Macdonnell’s whisky was the best; and so these two doctrines, in their intermittent pyrotechnics, continued to give the lie to each other under the deepening night.  Quite five minutes passed before Priam perceived, between the altercating doctrines, the high scaffold-clad summit of a building which was unfamiliar to him.  It looked serenely and immaterially beautiful in the evening twilight, and as he was close to Waterloo Bridge, his curiosity concerning beauty took him over to the south bank of the Thames.

After losing himself in the purlieus of Waterloo Station, he at last discovered the rear of the building.  Yes, it was a beautiful thing; its tower climbed in several coloured storeys, diminishing till it expired in a winged figure on the sky.  And below, the building was broad and massive, with a frontage of pillars over great arched windows.  Two cranes stuck their arms out from the general mass, and the whole enterprise was guarded in a hedge of hoardings.  Through the narrow doorway in the hoarding came the flare and the hissing of a Wells’s light.  Priam Farll glanced timidly within.  The interior was immense.  In a sort of court of honour a group of muscular, hairy males, silhouetted against an illuminated latticework of scaffolding, were chipping and paring at huge blocks of stone.  It was a subject for a Rembrandt.

A fat untidy man meditatively approached the doorway.  He had a roll of tracing papers in his hand, and the end of a long, thick pencil in his mouth.  He was the man who interpreted the dreams of the architect to the dreamy British artisan.  Experience of life had made him somewhat brusque.