and even as he resisted it was as though he were fighting himself.
Sidney Street was now quite black with thronging undergraduates moving towards the Common.

There was very little noise in it all; every now and again some voice would call aloud to some other voice and would be answered back; a murmur like the swelling of some stream, unlike, in its uniformity and curious evenness of note, any human conversation, seemed to cling to the old grey walls.

All of it at present orderly enough but with sinister omen in its very quiet.
Olva felt an increasing excitement as he moved.

It was an excitement that had some basis in the stir that was about him, in the murmur like bees of the crowd, in the soft stirring of grey branches above the walls of the street against the night sky, in the golden lights that, set in dim towers, shone high up above their heads.

In all these things there was a mysterious tremor that beat, with the rhythm of a pulse, from the town's very heart--but there was more than that in his excitement.