Graham’s eyes fell to the ways again.  A wedge of red a little way along the vista caught his eye.  He saw it was a dense mass of red-clad men jammed on the higher further way, their backs against the pitiless cliff of building, and surrounded by a dense crowd of antagonists.  They were fighting.  Weapons flashed and rose and fell, heads vanished at the edge of the contest, and other heads replaced them, the little flashes from the green weapons became little jets of smoky grey while the light lasted.

Abruptly the flare was extinguished and the ways were an inky darkness once more, a tumultuous mystery.

He felt something thrusting against him.  He was being pushed along the gallery.  Someone was shouting—­it might be at him.  He was too confused to hear.  He was thrust against the wall, and a number of people blundered past him.  It seemed to him that his guards were struggling with one another.

Suddenly the cable-hung star-holder appeared again, and the whole scene was white and dazzling.  The band of red-coats seemed broader and nearer; its apex was half-way down the ways towards the central aisle.  And raising his eyes Graham saw that a number of these men had also appeared now in the darkened lower galleries of the opposite building, and were firing over the heads of their fellows below at the boiling confusion of people on the lower ways.  The meaning of these things dawned upon him.  The march of the people had come upon an ambush at the very outset.  Thrown into confusion by the extinction of the lights they were now being attacked by the red police.  Then he became aware that he was standing alone, that his guards and Lincoln were along the gallery in the direction along which he had come before the darkness fell.  He saw they were gesticulating to him wildly, running back towards him.  A great shouting came from across the ways.  Then it seemed as though the whole face of the darkened building opposite was lined and speckled with red-clad men.  And they were pointing over to him and shouting.  “The Sleeper!  Save the Sleeper!” shouted a multitude of throats.

Something struck the wall above his head.  He looked up at the impact and saw a star-shaped splash of silvery metal.  He saw Lincoln near him.  Felt his arm gripped.  Then, pat, pat; he had been missed twice.

For a moment he did not understand this.  The street was hidden, everything was hidden, as he looked.  The second flare had burned out.

Lincoln had gripped Graham by the arm, was lugging him along the gallery.  “Before the next light!” he cried.  His haste was contagious.  Graham’s instinct of self-preservation overcame the paralysis of his incredulous astonishment.  He became for a time the blind creature of the fear of death.  He ran, stumbling because of the uncertainty of the darkness, blundered into his guards as they turned to run with him.  Haste was his one desire, to escape this perilous gallery upon which he was exposed.