f joy. Intoxication was mounting within him, as her slim, warm youth
moved and breathed beside him; and it was natural that he should read
her changing behaviour for something other than it was. A man of his
type asks for no advance from the woman; the woman he loves does not
make them; but at the same time he has a natural self-esteem, and
believes readily in his power to win the return he is certain he will
deserve.

"And this?" she said, moving restlessly towards his table, and taking up
the photograph of Edward Hallin.

"Ah! that is the greatest friend I have in the world. But I am sure you
know the name. Mr. Hallin--Edward Hallin."

She paused bewildered.

"What! _the_ Mr. Hallin--_that_ was Edward Hallin--who settled the
Nottingham strike last month--who lectures so much in the East End, and
in the north?"

"The same. We are old college friends. I owe him much, and in all his
excitements he does not forget old friends. There, you see--" and he
opened a blotting book and pointed smiling to some closely written
sheets lying within it--"is my last letter to him. I often write two of
those in the week, and he to me. We don't agree on a number of things,
but that doesn't matter."

"What can you find to write about?" she said wondering. "I thought
nobody wrote letters nowadays, only notes. Is it books, or people?"

"Both, when it pleases us!" How soon, oh! ye favouring gods, might he
reveal to her the part she herself played in those closely covered
sheets? "But he writes to me on social matters chiefly. His whole heart,
as you probably know, is in certain experiments and reforms in which he
sometimes asks me to help him."

Marcella opened her eyes. These were new lights. She began to recall all
that she had heard of young Hallin's position in the Labour movement;
his personal magnetism and prestige; his power as a speaker. Her
Socialist friends, she remembered, thought him in the way--a force, but
a dangerous one. He was for the follies of compromise--could not be got
to disavow the principle of private property, while ready to go great
lengths in certain directions towards collective action and corporate
control. The "stalwarts" of _her_ sect would have none of him as a
leader, while admitting his charm as a human being--a charm she
remembered to have heard discussed with some anxiety among her Venturist
friends. But for ordinary people he went far enough. Her father, she
remembered, had dubbed him an "Anarc