The child turned her head as they walked and looked at her. Joan felt herself smarting under that look, but persisted. “No,” laughed Joan. “At least, I don’t think so.”!

He saw her on to a bus at Kingston, and himself went back by train. They agreed they would not mention it to Mrs. Phillips. Not that she would have minded. The danger was that she would want to come, too; honestly thinking thereby to complete their happiness. It seemed to be tacitly understood there would be other such excursions. “How did he feel?” he asked her, leaning forward.

“The old pulpit became an evil, the moment it obtained unlimited power,” answered Mrs. Denton. “It originated persecution and inflamed men’s passions against one another. It, too, preached war for its own ends, taught superstition, and punished thought as a crime. The Press of to-day is stepping into the shoes of the medieval priest. It aims at establishing the worst kind of tyranny: the tyranny over men’s minds. They pretend to fight among themselves, but it’s rapidly becoming a close corporation. The Institute of Journalists will soon be followed by the union of Newspaper Proprietors and the few independent journals will be squeezed out. Already we have German shareholders on English papers; and English capital is interested in the St. Petersburg Press. It will one day have its International Pope and its school of cosmopolitan cardinals.” She did not see him again that night. They met in the morning at breakfast. A curious strangeness to each other seemed to have grown up between them, as if they had known one another long ago, and had half forgotten. When they had finished she rose to leave; but he asked her to stop, and, after the table had been cleared, he walked up and down the room, while she sat sideways on the window seat from where she could watch the little ships moving to and fro across the horizon, like painted figures in a show. The wounded men had heard it also. Dubos had moved forward. Madame Lelanne had risen. It came again, the thin, faint shrill of a distant bugle. Footsteps were descending the stairs. French soldiers, laughing, shouting, were crowding round them.