“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 the people’s neck again under their pitiless yoke?” “We have been meaning to call on you so often,” panted Mrs. Phillips. The room was crowded and the exertion of squeezing her way through had winded the poor lady. “We take so much interest in your articles. My husband—” she paused for a second, before venturing upon the word, and the aitch came out somewhat over-aspirated—“reads them most religiously. You must come and dine with us one evening.”!

She promised that she would. She always felt curiously at home with the Greysons. “Yes,” he said, “I love the sea. It’s clean and strong.”

“It was a foolish notion,” she said, “that of the Manchester school: that men and women could be treated as mere figures in a sum.” Poor fellow! She had come to understand that feeling. After all, it wasn’t altogether his fault that they had met. And she had been so cross to him! “I’m not so sure that it isn’t,” he laughed. “It’s the dinner-table that rules in England. We settle everything round a dinner-table.”