e had pulled herself together. "If this outrageous
story is current, Mrs. Cargill, there was nothing for it but to come
back. Your friends know that it is a gross libel. The only denial
necessary is for Mr. Cargill to resume his work. I trust his health is
better."

"He is well, but heartbroken. His is a sensitive nature, Lady
Caerlaverock, and he feels a stain like a wound."

"There is no stain," said my aunt briskly. "Every public man is a
target for scandals, but no one but a fool believes them. They will
die a natural death when he returns to work. An official denial would
make everybody look ridiculous, and encourage the ordinary person to
think that there may have been something in them. Believe me, dear
Mrs. Cargill, there is nothing to be anxious about now that you are
back in London again."

On the contrary, I thought, there was more cause for anxiety than ever.
Cargill was back in the House and the illness game could not be played
a second time. I went home that night acutely sympathetic towards the
worries of the Prime Minister. Mulross would be abroad in a day or
two, and Vennard and Cargill were volcanoes in eruption. The
Government was in a parlous state, with three demented Ministers on the
loose.

The same night I first heard the story of The Bill. Vennard had done
more than play golf at Littlestone. His active mind--for his bitterest
enemies never denied his intellectual energy--had been busy on a great
scheme. At that time, it will be remembered, a serious shrinkage of
unskilled labour existed not only in the Transvaal, but in the new
copper fields of East Africa. Simultaneously a famine was scourging
Behar, and Vennard, to do him justice, had made manful efforts to cope
with it. He had gone fully into the question, and had been slowly
coming to the conclusion that Behar was hopelessly overcrowded. In his
new frame of mind--unswervingly logical, utterly unemotional, and
wholly unbound by tradition--he had come to connect the African and
Indian troubles, and to see in one the relief of the other. The first
fruit of his meditations was a letter to The Times. In it he laid down
a new theory of emigration. The peoples of the Empire, he said, must
be mobile, shifting about to suit economic conditions. But if this was
true of the white man, it was equally true for the dark races under our
tutelage. He referred to the famine and argued that the recurrence of
such disasters was inev