ente repeated, with instant comprehension.

"Yes! I was thinking, only the other day, that you scarcely see enough
of Miller."

"I see all that I want to," was Tallente's candid comment.

Dartrey laid his hand upon his guest's shoulder. In his sombre dinner
garb, with low, turned-down collar and flowing black tie, his grey-black
beard cut to a point, his high forehead, his straightly brushed-back
hair, which still betrayed its tendency to natural curls, he looked a
great deal more like an artist of the dreamy and aesthetic type than a
man who had elaborated a new system of life and government.

"It is because of the feeling behind those words, Tallente," he said,
"that I have asked you to meet him here to-night. Miller has his
objectionable points, but he possesses still a great hold upon certain
types of the working man. I feel that you should appreciate that a
little more thoroughly. The politician, as you should know better than
I, has no personal feelings."

"The politician is left with very few luxuries," Tallente replied, with
a certain grimness.

Nora was announced, brilliant and gracious in a new dinner gown which
she frankly confessed had ruined her, and close behind her Miller, a
little ungainly in his overlong dress coat and badly arranged white tie.
It struck Tallente that he was aware of the object of the meeting and
his manner, obviously intended to be ingratiating, had still a touch of
self-conscious truculence.

They went into dinner, a few minutes later, and their host's tact in
including Nora in the party was at once apparent. She talked brightly
of the small happenings of their day-by-day political life and bridged
over the moments of awkwardness before general conversation assumed its
normal swing. Dartrey encouraged Miller to talk and they all listened
while he spoke of the mammoth trades unions of the north, where his hold
upon the people was greatest. He spoke still bitterly of the war, from
the moral effect of which, he argued, the working man had never wholly
recovered. Tallente listened a little grimly.

"The fervour of self-sacrifice and so-called patriotism which some of
the proletariat undoubtedly felt at the outbreak of the war," Miller
argued, "was only an incidental, a purely passing sensation compared to
the idle and greedy inertia which followed it. The war lost," he went
on, "might have acted as a lash upon the torpor of many of these men.
Won, it created a wave of immorality