into line. All the best things in the world,
everything civilization has won, will be in danger if--when this change
comes--the only women who have practical political training are the
women of the lower classes. Women of the lower classes,' he repeated,
'_and_'--the line between his eyebrows deepening--'women inoculated by
the Socialist virus.'

'Geoffrey!'

He was in no mood to discuss a concrete type. To so intelligent a girl,
a hint should be enough. He drew the telegraph-form that still lay on
the table towards him.

'Let us see how it would sound, shall we?'

He detached a gold pencil from one end of his watch-chain, and, with
face more and more intent, bent over the paper, writing.

The girl opened her lips more than once to speak, and each time fell
back again on her silent, half-incredulous misery.

When Stonor finished writing, he held the paper off, smiling a little,
with the craftsman's satisfaction in his work, and more than a touch of
shrewd malice--

'Enough dynamite in that,' he commented. 'Rather too much, isn't there,
little girl?'

'Geoffrey, I know her story.'

He looked at her for the first time since Farnborough left the room.

'Whose story?'

'Miss Levering's.'

'_Whose?_' He crushed the rough note of his manifesto into his pocket.

'Vida Levering's.'

He stared at the girl, till across the moment's silence a cry of misery
went out--

'Why did you desert her?'

'I?' he said, like one staggered by the sheer wildness of the charge.
'_I?_'

But no comfort of doubting seemed to cross the darkness of Jean's
backward look into the past.

'Oh, why did you do it?'

'What, in the name of----? What has she been saying to you?'

'Some one else told me part. Then the way you looked when you saw her at
Aunt Ellen's--Miss Levering's saying you didn't know her--then your
letting out that you knew even the curious name on the handkerchief--oh,
I pieced it together.'

While she poured out the disjointed sentences, he had recovered his
self-possession.

'Your ingenuity is undeniable,' he said coldly, rising to his feet. But
he paused as the girl went on--

'And then when she said that at the meeting about "the dark hour," and I
looked at her face, it flashed over me----Oh, why did you desert her?'

It was as if the iteration of that charge stung him out of his chill
anger.

'I _didn't_ desert her,' he said.

'Ah-h!' Her hands went fluttering up to her eyes, and hid the quiverin