ions--let the
man talk himself out,--and then, when silence seemed to give consent,
got rid of him.

It was now time that he should go to dress for dinner, but the motive
force was absent. He stood for a while considering, then went to the
window, and opening it let in the distant hum of the city traffic.

All sounded as usual, pleasant, busy, peaceable. Yet if what his
daughter told him was true, within half-an-hour those quietly-sounding
streets would be thronged with thousands upon thousands waiting for the
arrival of the women to claim their old historical right of petition;
and serried lines of police--thousands of them also--would be standing
to bar their way, whatever direction they might go in quest of the
governing authority. And in the hands of these women would be petitions
personally addressed to himself; yet never had any minister put to him
the question whether he would be willing to receive them and hear what
they had to say; such an idea seemed not to have entered their heads--or
was it the fear lest such a reception might give the cause too great an
importance in the public eye? Here, once again, then, proof met him of
the conspiracy of modern government constantly going on to bring about
disconnection between the Crown and the real life-needs and aspirations
of the people. Suffocating traditions closed him round making a cypher
of him--to himself a scorn and a derision, and a monster unto many--just
as much, by this denial of petition, a breaker of his Crown oath as
those who in the past had paid penalty for it with their lives!

There outside, in the nipping wintry air, he could hear the sounds of a
liberty he no longer shared: the trotting of cab-horses, the cry of
newsboys, the whiffle and hoot of motor-cars. Up through the bare trees
of the park swam a soft radiance of light from the lamps below, and
emergent like a full moon on a misty sky the face of the great
Parliament clock dawned luminous to his gaze.

So long he stood, and listened, and waited, that before he closed the
window again the clock had told the three-quarters to eight. Then he
hesitated no more; passing out of his study and down to a lower corridor
he came presently to the cloak lobby, and selecting a rough full-length
overcoat, a motor cap, and from a drawer a pair of clouded snow-glasses,
arrayed himself in these, and with flaps drawn down and coat collar
turned high, passed out by a small side-entrance which led on to the
t