upon him, and it was remarkable to him how soon that strangeness and the faint hostility that arose from it, disappeared; how soon he came to appreciate the true perspective of his position, and see the old Victorian days remote and quaint.  He found himself particularly amused by the red-haired daughter of the Manager of the European Piggeries.  On the second day after dinner he made the acquaintance of a latter-day dancing girl, and found her an astonishing artist.  And after that, more hypnotic wonders.  On the third day Lincoln was moved to suggest that the Master should repair to a Pleasure City, but this Graham declined, nor would he accept the services of the hypnotists in his aeronautical experiments.  The link of locality held him to London; he found a delight in topographical identifications that he would have missed abroad.  “Here—­or a hundred feet below here,” he could say, “I used to eat my midday cutlets during my London University days.  Underneath here was Waterloo and the tiresome hunt for confusing trains.  Often have I stood waiting down there, bag in hand, and stared up into the sky above the forest of signals, little thinking I should walk some day a hundred yards in the air.  And now in that very sky that was once a grey smoke canopy, I circle in a monoplane.”

During those three days Graham was so occupied with these distractions that the vast political movements in progress outside his quarters had but a small share of his attention.  Those about him told him little.  Daily came Ostrog, the Boss, his Grand Vizier, his mayor of the palace, to report in vague terms the steady establishment of his rule; “a little trouble” soon to be settled in this city, “a slight disturbance” in that.  The song of the social revolt came to him no more; he never learned that it had been forbidden in the municipal limits; and all the great emotions of the crow’s nest slumbered in his mind.

But on the second and third of the three days he found himself, in spite of his interest in the daughter of the Pig Manager, or it may be by reason of the thoughts her conversation suggested, remembering the girl Helen Wotton, who had spoken to him so oddly at the Wind-Vane Keeper’s gathering.  The impression, she had made was a deep one, albeit the incessant surprise of novel circumstances had kept him from brooding upon it for a space.  But now her memory was coming to its own.  He wondered what she had meant by those broken half-forgotten sentences; the picture of her eyes and the earnest passion of her face became more vivid as his mechanical interests faded.  Her slender beauty came compellingly between him and certain immediate temptations of ignoble passion.  But he did not see her again until three full days were past.

CHAPTER XVIII

GRAHAM REMEMBERS