“We’ll keep it off that plane, if you don’t mind,” answered Joan with a touch of severity. He was looking at the ring upon her hand.!

“You mean it?” said Flossie. “Of course you will go on seeing him—visiting them, and all that. But you won’t go gadding about, so that people can talk?” “You’ve been thinking,” Joan accused her. “What’s put all that into your head?”

They dined in state in the great dining-room. “I’ve no quarrel with the rich,” he said. “I don’t care how many rich men there are, so long as there are no poor. Who does? I was riding on a bus the other day, and there was a man beside me with a bandaged head. He’d been hurt in that railway smash at Morpeth. He hadn’t claimed damages from the railway company and wasn’t going to. ‘Oh, it’s only a few scratches,’ he said. ‘They’ll be hit hard enough as it is.’ If he’d been a poor devil on eighteen shillings a week it would have been different. He was an engineer earning good wages; so he wasn’t feeling sore and bitter against half the world. Suppose you tried to run an army with your men half starved while your officers had more than they could eat. It’s been tried and what’s been the result? See that your soldiers have their proper rations, and the General can sit down to his six-course dinner, if he will. They are not begrudging it to him. “Anything that can be done with a pen and ink,” she told him.