had put her loyal friendship
at my service.

"Even if we meet," I smiled, "nothing tragic will happen."

He expressed his relief.

"But what," I asked, "is Miss Faversham doing in this galley?"

"I suppose she is displaying an intelligent interest in modern thought,"
he said, with boyish delight at the chance I had offered him.

"_Touche_," said I, with a bow, and we entered the hall.

It was crowded. The audience consisted of the better class of artisans,
tradesmen, and foremen in factories: there was a sprinkling of
black-coated clerks and unskilled labouring men. A few women's hats
sprouted here and there among the men's heads like weeds in a desert.
There were women, too, in proportionately greater numbers, on the
platform at the end of the hall, and among them I was quick to notice
Eleanor Faversham. As Campion disliked platforms and high places in
synagogues, we sat on one of the benches near the door. He explained it
was also out of consideration for me.

"If Milligan is too strong for your proud, aristocratic stomach," he
whispered, "you can cut and run without attracting attention."

Milligan had evidently just began his discourse. I had not listened to
him for five minutes when I found myself caught in the grip which he was
famous for fastening on his audience. With his subject--Nationalisation
of the Land--and his arguments I had been perfectly familiar for years.
As a boy I had read Henry George's "Progress and Poverty" with the
superciliousness of the young believer in the divine right of Britain's
landed gentry, and before the Eton Debating Society I had demolished the
whole theory to my own and every one else's satisfaction. Later, as
a practical politician, I had kept myself abreast of the Socialist
movement. I did not need Mr. John Milligan, whom my lingering flippancy
had called a son of thunder, to teach me the elements of the matter. But
at this peculiar crisis of my life I felt that, in a queer, unknown way,
Milligan had a message for me. It was uncanny. I sat and listened to
the exposition of Utopia with the rapt intensity of any cheesemonger's
assistant there before whose captured spirit floated the vision of days
to come when the land should so flow with milk and money that golden
cheeses would be like buttercups for the plucking. It was not the man's
gospel that fascinated me nor his illuminated prophecy of the millennium
that produced the vibrations in my soul, but the surging passion