pli?"

"I shall never be the servant of the fait accompli," said Yeovil. "I
loathe it. As to fighting, one must first find out what weapon to use,
and how to use it effectively. One must watch and wait."

"One must not wait too long," said the old woman. "Time is on their
side, not ours. It is the young people we must fight for now, if they
are ever to fight for us. A new generation will spring up, a weaker
memory of old glories will survive, the eclat of the ruling race will
capture young imaginations. If I had your youth, Murrey, and your sex, I
would become a commercial traveller."

"A commercial traveller!" exclaimed Yeovil.

"Yes, one whose business took him up and down the country, into contact
with all classes, into homes and shops and inns and railway carriages.
And as I travelled I would work, work on the minds of every boy and girl
I came across, every young father and young mother too, every young
couple that were going to be man and wife. I would awaken or keep alive
in their memory the things that we have been, the grand, brave things
that some of our race have done, and I would stir up a longing, a
determination for the future that we must win back. I would be a counter-
agent to the agents of the fait accompli. In course of time the
Government would find out what I was doing, and I should be sent out of
the country, but I should have accomplished something, and others would
carry on the work. That is what I would do. Murrey, even if it is to be
a losing battle, fight it, fight it!"

Yeovil knew that the old lady was fighting her last battle, rallying the
discouraged, and spurring on the backward.

A footman came to announce that the carriage waited to take him back to
the station. His hostess walked with him through the hall, and came out
on to the stone-flagged terrace, the terrace from which a former Lady
Greymarten had watched the twinkling bonfires that told of Waterloo.

Yeovil said good-bye to her as she stood there, a wan, shrunken shadow,
yet with a greater strength and reality in her flickering life than those
parrot men and women that fluttered and chattered through London drawing-
rooms and theatre foyers.

As the carriage swung round a bend in the drive Yeovil looked back at
Torywood, a lone, grey building, couched like a watchdog with pricked
ears and wakeful eyes in the midst of the sleeping landscape. An old
pleading voice was still ringing in his ears:

Imperious