wage without
a minimum price."

They had risen.

"I'll give him your message," said Joan. "But I don't see him exchanging
his principles even for your support. I admit it's important."

"Talk it over with him," he said. "And bear this in mind for your own
guidance." He took a step forward, which brought his face quite close to
hers: "If he fails, and all his life's work goes for nothing, I shall be
sorry; but I shan't break my heart. He will."

Joan dropped a note into Phillips's letter-box on her return home, saying
briefly that she wished to see him; and he sent up answer asking her if
she would come to the gallery that evening, and meet him after his
speech, which would be immediately following the dinner hour.

It was the first time he had risen since his appointment, and he was
received with general cheers. He stood out curiously youthful against
the background of grey-haired and bald-headed men behind him; and there
was youth also in his clear, ringing voice that not even the vault-like
atmosphere of that shadowless chamber could altogether rob of its
vitality. He spoke simply and good-humouredly, without any attempt at
rhetoric, relying chiefly upon a crescendo of telling facts that
gradually, as he proceeded, roused the House to that tense stillness that
comes to it when it begins to think.

"A distinctly dangerous man," Joan overheard a little old lady behind her
comment to a friend. "If I didn't hate him, I should like him."

He met her in the corridor, and they walked up and down and talked, too
absorbed to be aware of the curious eyes that were turned upon them. Joan
gave him Carleton's message.

"It was clever of him to make use of you," he said. "If he'd sent it
through anybody else, I'd have published it."

"You don't think it even worth considering?" suggested Joan.

"Protection?" he flashed out scornfully. "Yes, I've heard of that. I've
listened, as a boy, while the old men told of it to one another, in thin,
piping voices, round the fireside; how the labourers were flung eight-and-
sixpence a week to die on, and the men starved in the towns; while the
farmers kept their hunters, and got drunk each night on fine old crusted
port. Do you know what their toast was in the big hotels on market day,
with the windows open to the street: 'To a long war and a bloody one.' It
would be their toast to-morrow, if they had their way. Does he think I
am going to be a party to the putting of