wasn't perfectly sure that he really had thought she was thinking of
the Argentine when she had proposed writing to Brazil in Spanish. Was it
possible that he was not being entirely respectful to her? She would not
have that, for she was splendid herself too, though the idiot world had
given her no chance to show it. She pulled herself together, knitted her
brows, and looked as much like Mr. Gladstone as could be managed with
such a pliable profile.

"Sell me one of your papers," he said. "No, don't bother about the
change. The Cause can let itself go on the odd elevenpence. Well, I
think you're wonderful to stand out here in this awful weather with all
these blighters going by."

"When one is wrapped up in a great Cause," replied Ellen superbly, "one
hardly notices these minor discomforts. Will you not take a ticket for
the meeting next Friday at the Synod Hall? Mrs. Ormiston and Mrs. Mark
Lyle are speaking. The tickets are half-a-crown and a shilling. But
you'll find the shilling ones quite good, for they're both exceptionally
clear and audible speakers. Women are."

"Next Friday? Yes, I can come up that night. Are you taking the chair,
or seconding the resolution, or anything like that?"

"Me? Mercy, no!" gasped Ellen. Had he really been taken in by her bluff
that she was grown-up? For she had a feeling, which she would never
admit even to herself but which came to her nearly every day, that she
was a truant child masquerading in long skirts, and that at any moment
someone might come and with the bleak unanswerable authority of a
schoolmistress order her back to her short frocks and the class-room.
But this was nonsense, for she really was grown-up. She was seventeen
past and earning. "No. I'll be stewarding and selling literature."

"Good." He handed her half-a-crown and took the ticket from her, folded
it across, hesitated, and asked appealingly: "I say, hadn't you better
write your name on this? I once went to a Suffrage meeting in Glasgow
and they wouldn't let me in because they thought I looked the sort of
person who would interrupt. But if you wrote your name on my ticket
they'll know I'm all right." He gave her a pencil-stump, and as she
wrote reflected: "How do I come to be such a fluent liar? I didn't get
it from my mother. No, not from my mother. I suppose my father had that
vice as well as the others. But why am I taking so much trouble to find
out about this little girl--I who don't care a damn about