Coming from a man who had reached high rank in the Army before retiring, the advice had carried great weight. But the Commander of the uniformed branch, an old friend of Gideon, had been very edgy.

“These young devils could cause a lot of trouble, George,” he had growled after the meeting.

“Yes, but they probably won’t.”

“It’s easy for you — we bear the brunt of it!” the Uniform Commander had complained.

“You can have every man in the C.I.D., and you know it,” Gideon had replied. “And with all leave stopped and every man on duty, there shouldn’t be much to worry about.”

But even he had wondered, for there were ugly stories of trained saboteurs and experienced rabble rousers being brought into the country; reports of the planned use by the trouble-makers of tear-gas; even reports of alleged caches of arms with which to fight the police. As the Sunday had drawn near, every senior officer — and probably most men of all ranks in the Force — had been on edge, prepared for near-catastrophe.

The demonstration, a complete success, had caused practically no incidents. A few smoke-bombs, a few marbles tossed under the feet of the police horses, a few isolated struggles — and a great deal of good humour and repartee between demonstrators and the police., Trafalgar Square had looked as if all London had been picnicking there over the weekend and left all their rubbish behind them, but there was no damage. Other demonstrations had followed much the same trend. The police had discovered by trial and error the best way to handle would-be rioters and had also discovered something which had not surprised Gideon at all. Most of the demonstrators were good-natured, decent, reasonable human beings.

His smile faded slowly as he thought beyond this. There was one subject which seemed to bring out the worst in all the people involved, even the decent and the reasonable: that subject was racialism. He himself was emotionally incapable of racial prejudice: to him, a man was simply a man. But many did feel such prejudice and there were times when the bitterness of racial conflict reached an ugly crescendo, in London particularly, over the present social structure of South Africa.