With an effort that seemed to turn her into stone, she regained command over herself. “What do you think of him?” he said, without looking at her.!

“You left a glove behind you, the first day you ever came to our house,” Mary explained. “And I kept it.” Joan took him into her room at the end of the ward, from where, through the open door, she could still keep watch. They spoke in low tones.

“Tell me,” asked Joan, “am I likely to meet with much of that sort of thing?” “It doesn’t read quite the same,” he answered. “Phillips goes home under the impression that he has made a great success and has roused the country. He and millions of other readers learn from the next morning’s headlines that it was ‘A Tame Speech’ that he made. What sounded to him ‘Loud Cheers’ have sunk to mild ‘Hear, Hears.’ That five minutes’ hurricane of applause, during which wildly excited men and women leapt upon the benches and roared themselves hoarse, and which he felt had settled the whole question, he searches for in vain. A few silly interjections, probably pre-arranged by Carleton’s young lions, become ‘renewed interruptions.’ The report is strictly truthful; but the impression produced is that Robert Phillips has failed to carry even his own people with him. And then follow leaders in fourteen widely-circulated Dailies, stretching from the Clyde to the Severn, foretelling how Mr. Robert Phillips could regain his waning popularity by the simple process of adopting Tariff Reform: or whatever the pet panacea of Carleton and Co. may, at the moment, happen to be.” The atmosphere was becoming tragic. Joan felt the need of escaping from it. She sprang up.