loyment, and rob them of the produce
of their gardens and allotments. No arguments were used. A daily stream
of abuse, misrepresentation and deliberate lies, set forth under flaming
headlines, served their simple purpose. The one weekly paper that had
got itself established among them, that their fathers had always taken,
that dimly they had come to look upon as their one friend, Carleton had
at last succeeded in purchasing. When that, too, pictured Phillips's
plan as a diabolical intent to take from them even the little that they
had, and give it to the loafing socialist and the bloated foreigner, no
room for doubt was left to them.

He had organized volunteer cycle companies of speakers from the towns,
young working-men and women and students, to go out on summer evenings
and hold meetings on the village greens. They were winning their way.
But it was slow work. And Carleton was countering their efforts by a
hired opposition that followed them from place to place, and whose
interruptions were made use of to represent the whole campaign as a
fiasco.

"He's clever," laughed Phillips. "I'd enjoy the fight, if I'd only
myself to think of, and life wasn't so short."

The laugh died away and a shadow fell upon his face.

"If I could get a few of the big landlords to come in on my side," he
continued, "it would make all the difference in the world. They're
sensible men, some of them; and the whole thing could be carried out
without injury to any legitimate interest. I could make them see that,
if I could only get them quietly into a corner."

"But they're frightened of me," he added, with a shrug of his broad
shoulders, "and I don't seem to know how to tackle them."

Those drawing-rooms? Might not something of the sort be possible? Not,
perhaps, the sumptuous salon of her imagination, thronged with the fair
and famous, suitably attired. Something, perhaps, more homely, more
immediately attainable. Some of the women dressed, perhaps, a little
dowdily; not all of them young and beautiful. The men wise, perhaps,
rather than persistently witty; a few of them prosy, maybe a trifle
ponderous; but solid and influential. Mrs. Denton's great empty house in
Gower Street? A central situation and near to the tube. Lords and
ladies had once ruffled there; trod a measure on its spacious floors;
filled its echoing stone hall with their greetings and their partings.
The gaping sconces, where their link-boys had exting