man beside him.

Bennett was no orator. He was a plain man, ennobled by the training of
religious dissent, at the same time indifferently served often by an
imperfect education. But the very simplicity and homeliness of its
expression gave additional weight to this first avowal of a strong
conviction that the time had come when the Labour party _must_ have
separateness and a leader if it were to rise out of insignificance; to
this frank renunciation of whatever personal claims his own past might
have given him; and to the promise of unqualified support to the policy
of the younger man, in both its energetic and conciliatory aspects. He
threw out a little not unkindly indignation, if one may be allowed the
phrase, in the direction of Wilkins--who in the middle of the speech
abruptly walked out--and before he sat down, the close attention, the
looks, the cheers, the evident excitement of the men sitting about
him,--amongst whom were two-thirds of the whole Labour representation in
Parliament--made it clear to the House that the speech marked an epoch
not only in the career of Harry Wharton, but in the parliamentary
history of the great industrial movement.

The white-bearded bore under the gallery, whom Wharton had pointed out
to Marcella, got up as Bennett subsided. The house streamed out like one
man. Bennett, exhausted by the heat and the effort, mopped his brow with
his red handkerchief, and, in the tension of fatigue, started as he felt
a touch upon his arm. Wharton was bending over to him--perfectly white,
with a lip he in vain tried to steady.

"I can't thank you," he said; "I should make a fool of myself."

Bennett nodded pleasantly, and presently both were pressing into the
out-going crowd, avoiding each other with the ineradicable instinct of
the Englishman.

Wharton did not recover his self-control completely till, after an
ordeal of talk and handshaking in the lobby, he was on his way to the
Ladies' Gallery. Then in a flash he found himself filled with the
spirits, the exhilaration, of a schoolboy. This wonderful experience
behind him!--and upstairs, waiting for him, those eyes, that face! How
could he get her to himself somehow for a moment--and dispose of that
Craven girl?

"Well!" he said to her joyously, as she turned round in the darkness of
the Gallery.

But she was seized with sudden shyness, and he felt, rather than saw,
the glow of pleasure and excitement which possessed her.

"Don't let's t