for a few days of the leader of his party. He arrived without
sending word of his coming, to find the whole of the house party absent
at a cricket match. The short respite was altogether welcome to him. He
changed his clothes and wandered off into the gardens. Here an hour or so
later Berenice's maid found him.

"Her Grace would like to see you, sir, if you would come to her
sitting-room," the girl said, with a demure smile.

Mannering, with something of an inward groan, followed her. Berenice,
very slim and stately in her simple white muslin gown, rose from the
couch as he entered, and held out her hands.

"At last," she murmured. "You provoking man, to stay away so long. And
what have you been doing with yourself?"

Her sentence concluded with a little note of dismay. Mannering was
positively haggard in the clear afternoon light. There were lines
underneath his eyes, and his face had a tense, drawn appearance. He did
not kiss her, as she had more than half expected. He held her hands for
a moment, and then sank down upon the couch by her side.

"It was not exactly easy work--up there," he said.

She noticed the repression.

"Tell me all about it," she begged.

His thoughts surged back to those three weeks of tragedy. His personal
misery became for the moment a shadowy thing. The sorrows of one man,
what were they to the breaking hearts of millions? He thought of the
children, and he shuddered.

"It isn't so much to tell," he said. "I have been to a dozen or so of the
largest towns in the North, and have taken the manufacturers one by one.
I have taken their wage sheets and compared them with past years. The
result was always the same. Less money distributed amongst more people.
Afterwards we went amongst the people themselves--to see how they lived.
It was like a chapter from the inferno--an epic of loathsome tragedy. I
have seen the children, Berenice, and God help the next generation."

"You must not forget, Lawrence," she said, "that character is an
essential factor in poverty. Poverty there must always be, because of
the idle and shiftless."

"Individual poverty, yes," he answered. "Not wholesale poverty, not
streets of it, towns of it. I don't talk about starving people, although
I saw them too. Our vicious charitable system may keep their cry from our
ears, but my sympathies go out to the man who ought to be earning two
pounds a week, and who is earning fifteen shillings; the man who used to
have hi