wed some animation under her veil. Her
eyes followed the speaker with a quick attention.

As for the men, as they turned clumsily to stare at, to laugh, or talk
to each other, Marcella could hardly make out whether they were angered
or fascinated. Whichever it was, Wharton cared for none of them. His
blood was up; his fatigue thrown off. Standing there in front of them,
his hands in his pockets, pale with the excitement of speaking, his
curly head thrown out against the whitened wall of the chapel, he lashed
into the men before him, talking their language, their dialect even;
laying bare their weaknesses, sensualities, indecisions; painting in the
sombrest colours the grim truths of their melancholy lives.

Marcella could hardly breathe. It seemed to her that, among these
cottagers, she had never lived till now--under the blaze of these
eyes--within the vibration of this voice. Never had she so realised the
power of this singular being. He was scourging, dissecting, the
weather-beaten men before him, as, with a difference, he had scourged,
dissected her. She found herself exulting in his powers of tyranny, in
the naked thrust of his words, so nervous, so pitiless. And then by a
sudden flash she thought of him by Mrs. Hurd's fire, the dying child on
his knee, against his breast. "Here," she thought, while her pulses
leapt, "is the leader for me--for these. Let him call, I will follow."

It was as though he followed the ranging of her thought, for suddenly,
when she and his hearers least expected it, his tone changed, his storm
of speech sank. He fell into a strain of quiet sympathy, encouragement,
hope; dwelt with a good deal of homely iteration on the immediate
practical steps which each man before him could, if he would, take
towards the common end; spoke of the help and support lying ready for
the country labourers throughout democratic England if they would but
put forward their own energies and quit themselves like men; pointed
forward to a time of plenty, education, social peace; and so--with some
good-tempered banter of his opponent, old Dodgson, and some precise
instructions as to how and where they were to record their votes on the
day of election--came to an end. Two or three other speeches followed,
and among them a few stumbling words from Hurd. Marcella approved
herself and applauded him, as she recognised a sentence or two taken
bodily from the _Labour Clarion_ of the preceding week. Then a
resolution ple