Phillips came down looking more cheerful. He had detected improvement in Mrs. Phillips. She was more hopeful in herself. They talked in low tones during the meal, as people do whose thoughts are elsewhere. It happened quite suddenly, Phillips explained. They had come down a few days after the rising of Parliament. There had been a spell of hot weather; but nothing remarkable. The first attack had occurred about three weeks ago. It was just after Hilda had gone back to school. He wasn’t sure whether he ought to send for Hilda, or not. Her mother didn’t want him to—not just yet. Of course, if she got worse, he would have to. What did Joan think?—did she think there was any real danger? She thought that even then God might reconsider it—see her point of view. Perhaps He would send her a sign.!

“Fifteen years,” she answered. “I was a bit older than ’im. But I’ve never looked my age, they tell me. Lord, what a boy ’e was! Swept you off your feet, like. ’E wasn’t the only one. I’d got a way with me, I suppose. Anyhow, the men seemed to think so. There was always a few ’anging about. Like flies round a ’oney-pot, Mother used to say.” She giggled. “But ’e wouldn’t take No for an answer. And I didn’t want to give it ’im, neither. I was gone on ’im, right enough. No use saying I wasn’t.” “Forgive me,” he said. “You must remember that I am still her lover.” They had reached the tree that leant a little forward beyond its fellows, and he had halted and turned so that he was facing her. “Did she and your father get on together. Was she happy?”

“He tried to be shy with me,” said Mrs. Phillips, “but I wouldn’t let him. I chipped him out of it. If he’s going to write plays, as I told him, he will have to get over his fear of a petticoat.” “I do not know,” he answered her. “I don’t seem to care.” She was still interested in his work and keen to help him. It was going to be a stiff fight. He himself, in spite of Carleton’s opposition, had been returned with an increased majority; but the Party as a whole had suffered loss, especially in the counties. The struggle centred round the agricultural labourer. If he could be won over the Government would go ahead with Phillips’s scheme. Otherwise there was danger of its being shelved. The difficulty was the old problem of how to get at the men of the scattered villages, the lonely cottages. The only papers that they ever saw were those, chiefly of the Carleton group, that the farmers and the gentry took care should come within their reach; that were handed to them at the end of their day’s work as a kindly gift; given to the school children to take home with them; supplied in ample numbers to all the little inns and public-houses. In all these, Phillips was held up as their arch enemy, his proposal explained as a device to lower their wages, decrease their chances of employment, and rob them of the produce of their gardens and allotments. No arguments were used. A daily stream of abuse, misrepresentation and deliberate lies, set forth under flaming headlines, served their simple purpose. The one weekly paper that had got itself established among them, that their fathers had always taken, that dimly they had come to look upon as their one friend, Carleton had at last succeeded in purchasing. When that, too, pictured Phillips’s plan as a diabolical intent to take from them even the little that they had, and give it to the loafing socialist and the bloated foreigner, no room for doubt was left to them.