The difficulties which seemed to make a peaceful settlement of the Egyptian question impossible began to disappear. The representations of France and Russia became more conciliatory. The darkest of recent war-clouds vanished before the month had passed. CHAPTER X. SHADOWS OF GREAT EVILS. Robert Brent was in London for the first time since he started upon his almost hopeless quest of fortune’s favor in the summer of 1893. He had been the only passenger on the _Mystery_, whose epoch-making voyage a few days before was still the marvel of the Old and the New Worlds. This return to the old-fashioned, homely comforts of solid London he had anticipated with peculiar satisfaction. He felt more at home in Piccadilly than in Broadway. For six months he had told himself it was worth a trip across the Atlantic to be able to ride in a rubber-tired cab upon an asphalt pavement. The New York business man cannot understand why it is that a Londoner flies away to the river, the sea-shore, or the country on the slightest pretext “to rest.” To say nothing of the extreme deliberation--to use an inoffensive term--in all his business methods, the citizen of the British metropolis has little in the common feature of municipal life to distract him. No gong ever clangs in a London street. Not even on a fire-engine is that abomination tolerated. Broadway has become a municipal boiler-shop, to be fled from with bursting ear-drums. In Piccadilly, the wheels are silent and the horses seem to step lightly on the almost elastic pavement. Toleration of noise in all its forms is, indeed, the great surviving element of barbarism in the American people. Its relentless suppression is the only obvious superiority of European civilization above that of the New World. But London did not seem the same to Brent after his two years’ absence. He avoided at first his old resorts, and did not seek out the associates from whom he had been completely cut off since he bade them good-by in early September, 1893. The old life did not tempt him as he had expected it would. London was the same, yet different. “It must be because everybody is out of town for the holidays,” he told himself, in trying to account for his intangible impression of change.