,
but this same Mr. Mersch is the grand duke of somewhere or other, and we
must bolster him up in his kingdom, or else there will be trouble with
the powers." Powers--what's powers to me?--or Greenland? when there's
Slingsby, a man I've smoked a pipe with every market evening of my life,
in the workhouse? And there's hundreds of Slingsbys all over the
country.'"

"The man was working himself--Slingsby _was_ a good sort of man. It
shocked even me. One knows what goes on in one's own village, of course.
And it's only too true that there's hundreds of Slingsbys--I'm not
boring you, am I?"

I did not answer for a moment. "I--I had no idea," I said; "I have been
so long out of it and over there one did not realise the ... the
feeling."

"You've been well out of it," she answered; "one has had to suffer, I
assure you." I believed that she had had to suffer; it must have taken
a good deal to make that lady complain. Her large, ruddy features
followed the droop of her eyes down to the fringe of the parasol that
she was touching the turf with. We were sitting on garden seats in the
dappled shade of enormous elms.

There was in the air a touch of the sounds discoursed by a yeomanry band
at the other end of the grounds. One could see the red of their uniforms
through moving rifts in the crowd of white dresses.

"That wasn't even the worst," she said suddenly, lifting her eyes and
looking away between the trunks of the trees. "The man has been reading
the papers and he gave me the benefit of his reflections. 'Someone's got
to be punished for this;' he said, 'we've got to show them that you
can't be hand-and-glove with that sort of blackguard, without paying for
it. I don't say, mind you, that Mr. Churchill is or ever has been. I
know him, and I trust him. But there's more than me in the world, and
they can't all know him. Well, here's the papers saying--or they don't
say it, but they hint, which is worse in a way--that he must be, or he
wouldn't stick up for the man. They say the man's a blackguard out and
out--in Greenland too; has the blacks murdered. Churchill says the
blacks are to be safe-guarded, that's the word. Well, they may be--but
so ought Slingsby to have been, yet it didn't help him. No, my lady,
we've got to put our own house in order and that first, before thinking
of the powers or places like Greenland. What's the good of the saner
policy that Mr. Churchill talks about, if you can't trust anyone with
your mon