imself and you--that one who
does know shall tell you something of the truth of these things."

There was an intense and breathless silence. This was an assembly
amongst whom excitement was a very rare visitant. But there were many
there now who sat still and spellbound with eyes riveted upon the
speaker. To those who were personally acquainted with him a certain
change in his appearance was manifest. A spot of colour flared in his
pale cheeks. There was a light in his eyes which no one had ever seen
there before. After years of self-repression, of a cynicism partly
artificial, partly inevitable, the natural man had broken out once more,
stung into life by time smooth platitudes of the great churchman
against whom his attack was directed. He was reckless of time fact
that Lady Caroom, Brooks, and many of his acquaintances were in the
Strangers' Gallery. For the motion before the House was one to obtain
legal and ecclesiastical control over all independent charities
appealing to the general public for support, under cover of which the
Church, in the person of the Bishop of Beeston, had made a solemn and
deliberate attack upon Brooks' Society, Brooks himself, its aims and
management.

As the words fell, deliberately, yet without hesitation, from his lips,
vivid, scathing, forceful, there was not one there but knew that this
man spoke of the things which he had felt. The facts he marshalled
before them were appalling, but not a soul doubted them. It was truth
which he hurled at them, truth before which the Bishop sat back in his
seat and felt his cheeks grow paler and his eyes more full of trouble.
A great deal of it they had heard before, but never like this--never had
it been driven home into their conscience so that doubt or evasion was
impossible. And this man, who was he? They rubbed their eyes and
wondered. Ninth Marquis of Arranmore, owner of great estates,
dilettante, sportsman, cynic, latter-day sinner--or an apostle touched
with fire from Heaven to open men's eyes, gifted for a few brief minutes
with the tongue of a saintly Demosthenes. Those who knew him gaped like
children and wondered. And all the time his words stung them like drops
of burning rain.

"This," he concluded at last, "is the Hell which burns for ever under
this great city, and it is such men as his lordship the Bishop of
Beeston who can come here and speak of their agony in well-rounded
periods and congratulate you and himself upon the increas