He came out presently into Victoria Street and turned westwards.

He did not notice much as he went.  Only his most superficial faculties paid attention to the great quiet lighted thoroughfare, to the few figures that moved along, to the scattered sentinels of the City of Westminster police in their blue and silver, who here and there stood at the corners of the cross-streets, who saluted him as he went by; to the little lighted shrines that here and there hung at the angles.  Certainly it was a Catholic city, he perceived in his bitterness, drilled and disciplined by its religion; there was no noise, no glare, no apparent evil.  And the marvel was that the people seemed to love to have it so!  He remembered questioning a friend or two soon after his return to England as to the revival of these Curfew laws, and the xtraordinary vigilance over morals; and the answer he had received to the effect that those things were taken now as a matter of course.  One priest had told him that civilization in the modern sense would be inconceivable without them.  How else could the few rule the many? . . .

He came down, across Parliament Square, to the river at last, walking swiftly and purposelessly.  A high gateway, with a guard-room on either side, spanned the entrance to the wide bridge that sprang across to Southwark, and an officer stepped out as he approached, saluted, and waited.

He drove down his impatience with an effort, remembering the espionage (as he called it) practised after nightfall.

“I want to breathe and look at the river,” he said sharply.

The officer paused an instant.

“Very good, father,” he said.

Ah, this was better! . . .  The bridge, empty from end to end, so far as he could see, ran straight over to the south side, where, once again, there rose up the guard-house.  He turned sharply when he saw it, and leaned on the parapet looking eastwards.

The eternal river flowed beneath him, clean and steady and strong, between the high embankments. (He knew by now all about the lock-system that counteracted the ebb and flow of the tides.) Scarcely a hundred yards away curved out another bridge, and behind that another and another, down into the distance, all outlined in half-lights that shone like stars and flashed back like heaven itself from the smooth-running water beneath.  An extraordinary silence lay over all—­the silence of a sleeping city—­though it was scarcely yet midnight, and though the city itself on either side of the river lay white and glowing in the lights that burned everywhere till dawn.

At first it quieted him—­this vision of earthly peace, this perfection to which order and civilization had come; and then, as he regarded it, it enraged him. . . .