easible! Yet he was one of the
honestest of men, and, within a certain range, one of the most
clear-headed. As for the others, they had been all against him.
Intellectually, their opinion did not matter to him; but morally it was
so strange to him to find himself on the side of doubt and dissent,
while all his friends were talking language which was almost the
language of a new faith!

He had various lecturing engagements ahead, connected with this great
debate which was now surging throughout the Labour world of London. He
had accepted them with eagerness; in these weary night hours he looked
forward to them with terror, seeing before him perpetually thousands of
hostile faces, living in a nightmare of lost sympathies and broken
friendships. Oh, for _sleep_--for the power to rest--to escape this
corrosion of an ever active thought, which settled and reconciled
nothing!

"_The tragedy of life lies in the conflict between the creative will of
man and the hidden wisdom of the world, which seems to thwart it_."
These words, written by one whose thought had penetrated deep into his
own, rang in his ears as he sat brooding there. Not the hidden fate, or
the hidden evil, but the hidden _wisdom_. Could one die and still
believe it? Yet what else was the task of faith?

CHAPTER VI.

"So I understand you wish me to go down at once?" said Louis Craven.
"This is Friday--say Monday?"

Wharton nodded. He and Craven were sitting in Marcella's little
sitting-room. Their hostess and Edith Craven had escaped through the
door in the back kitchen communicating with the Hurds' tenement, so that
the two men might be left alone a while. The interview between them had
gone smoothly, and Louis Craven had accepted immediate employment on the
_Labour Clarion_, as the paper's correspondent in the Midlands, with
special reference to the important strike just pending. Wharton, whose
tendency in matters of business was always to go rather further than he
had meant to go, for the sake generally of making an impression on the
man with whom he was dealing, had spoken of a two years' engagement, and
had offered two hundred a year. So far as that went, Craven was
abundantly satisfied.

"And I understand from you," he said, "that the paper _goes in_ for the
strike, that you will fight it through?"

He fixed his penetrating greenish eyes on his companion. Louis Craven
was now a tall man with narrow shoulders, a fine oval head and face,
de