asked, not being able to
think of anything else to say.

He opened his eyes with a start.

In that instant's quiet the scene he had just lived through had been
rushing before him again--the long table in the panelled committee-room,
the keen angry faces gathered about it. Bennett, in his blue tie and
shabby black coat, the clear moist eyes vexed and miserable--Molloy,
small and wiry, business-like in the midst of confusion, cool in the
midst of tumult--and Wilkins, a black, hectoring leviathan, thundering
on the table as he flung his broad Yorkshire across it, or mouthing out
Denny's letter in the midst of the sudden electrical silence of some
thirty amazed and incredulous hearers.

"_Spies,_ yo call us?" with a finger like a dart, threatening the
enemy--"Aye; an' yo're aboot reet! I and my friends--we _have_ been
trackin' and spyin' for weeks past. We _knew_ those men, those starvin'
women and bairns, were bein' _sold_, but we couldn't prove it. Now
we've come at the how and the why of it! And we'll make it harder for
men like you to _sell 'em again_! Yo call it infamy?--well, _we_ call it
detection."

Then rattling on the inner ear came the phrases of the attack which
followed on the director of "The People's Banking Association," the
injured innocent of as mean a job, as unsavoury a bit of vulturous
finance, as had cropped into publicity for many a year--and finally the
last dramatic cry:

"But it's noa matter, yo say! Mester Wharton has nobbut played his party
and the workin' man a dirty trick or two--_an' yo mun have a gentleman!_
Noa--the workin' man isn't fit _himself_ to speak wi' his own enemies i'
th' gate--_yo mun have a gentleman_!--an' Mester Wharton, he says he'll
tak' the post, an' dea his best for yo--an', remember, _yo mun have a
gentleman_! Soa now--Yes! or No!--wull yo?--or _woan't yo_?"

And at that, the precipitation of the great unwieldy form half across
the table towards Wharton's seat--the roar of the speaker's immediate
supporters thrown up against the dead silence of the rest!

As to his own speech--he thought of it with a soreness, a disgust which
penetrated to bones and marrow. He had been too desperately taken by
surprise--had lost his nerve--missed the right tone throughout. Cool
defiance, free self-justification, might have carried him through.
Instead of which--faugh!

All this was the phantom-show of a few seconds' thought. He roused
himself from a miserable reaction of mind an