with him it would be his clear duty, as a man of honour and one who
wished her well, to discourage any such feeling and to keep away from
her. But the Dictator honestly believed that he was entitled to put any
such thought as that out of his mind. The very frankness--the childlike
frankness--with which she had approached him made it clear that she had
no thought of any love-making being possible between them. 'She thinks
of me as a man almost old enough to be her father,' he said to himself.
So the Dictator reconciled his conscience, and still kept on seeing her.

CHAPTER XVI

THE CHILDREN OF GRIEVANCE

The Dictator and Hamilton stood in Ericson's study, waiting to receive a
deputation. The Dictator had agreed to receive this deputation from an
organisation of working men. The deputation desired to complain of the
long hours of work and the small rate of pay from which English artisans
in many branches of labour had to suffer. Why they had sought to see him
he could not very well tell--and certainly if it had been left to
Hamilton, whose mind was set on sparing the Dictator all avoidable
trouble, and who, moreover, had in his heart of hearts no great belief
in remedy by working-men's deputation, the poor men would probably not
have been accorded the favour of an interview. But the Dictator insisted
on receiving them, and they came; trooped into the room awkwardly; at
first seemed slow of speech, and soon talked a great deal. He listened
to all they had to say, and put questions and received answers, and
certainly impressed the deputation with the conviction that if his
Excellency the ex-Dictator of Gloria could not do anything very much for
them, his heart at least was in their cause. He had an idea in his mind
of something he could do to help the over-oppressed English working
man--and that was the reason why he had consented to receive the
deputation.

The spokesman of the deputation was a gaunt and haggard-looking man. The
dirt seemed ingrained in him--in his hands, his eyebrows, his temples,
under his hair, up to his very eyes. He told a pitiful story of long
work and short pay--of hungry children and an over-tasked wife. He told,
in fact, the story familiar to all of us--the 'chestnut' of the
newspapers--the story which the busy man of ordinary society is not
expected to trouble himself by reading any more--supposing he ever had
read it at all.

The Dictator, however, was not an ordinary society man, a