For a time he was jostled, obstructed, and endangered by men hoarse and weary with cheering his name, some of them bandaged and bloody in his cause.  The frontage of the wind-vane offices was illuminated by some moving picture, but what it was he could not see, because in spite of his strenuous attempts the density of the crowd prevented his approaching it.  From the fragments of speech he caught, he judged it conveyed news of the fighting about the Council House.  Ignorance and indecision made him slow and ineffective in his movements.  For a time he could not conceive how he was to get within the unbroken facade of this place.  He made his way slowly into the midst of this mass of people, until he realised that the descending staircase of the central way led to the interior of the buildings.  This gave him a goal, but the crowding in the central path was so dense that it was long before he could reach it.  And even then he encountered intricate obstruction, and had an hour of vivid argument first in this guard room and then in that before he could get a note taken to the one man of all men who was most eager to see him.  His story was laughed to scorn at one place, and wiser for that, when at last he reached a second stairway he professed simply to have news of extraordinary importance for Ostrog.  What it was he would not say.  They sent his note reluctantly.  For a long time he waited in a little room at the foot of the lift shaft, and thither at last came Lincoln, eager, apologetic, astonished.  He stopped in the doorway scrutinising Graham, then rushed forward effusively.

“Yes,” he cried.  “It is you.  And you are not dead!”

Graham made a brief explanation.

“My brother is waiting,” explained Lincoln.  “He is alone in the wind-vane offices.  We feared you had been killed in the theatre.  He doubted—­and things are very urgent still in spite of what we are telling them there—­or he would have come to you.”

They ascended a lift, passed along a narrow passage, crossed a great hall, empty save for two hurrying messengers, and entered a comparatively little room, whose only furniture was a long settee and a large oval disc of cloudy, shifting grey, hung by cables from the wall.  There Lincoln left Graham for a space, and he remained alone without understanding the smoky shapes that drove slowly across this disc.

His attention was arrested by a sound that began abruptly.  It was cheering, the frantic cheering of a vast but very remote crowd, a roaring exultation.  This ended as sharply as it had begun, like a sound heard between the opening and shutting of a door.  In the outer room was a noise of hurrying steps and a melodious clinking as if a loose chain was running over the teeth of a wheel.

Then he heard the voice of a woman, the rustle of unseen garments.  “It is Ostrog!” he heard her say.  A little bell rang fitfully, and then everything was still again.