lf up, a cloud over her fine eyes. Miss Raeburn, looking
round, was glad to see the servants had left the room.

"Miss Boyce thinks we are all in a very bad way, I'm sure. I have heard
tales of Miss Boyce's opinions!" said Lord Maxwell, smiling at her, with
an old man's indulgence, as though provoking her to talk.

Her slim fingers were nervously crumbling some bread beside her; her
head was drooped a little. At his challenge she looked up with a start.
She was perfectly conscious of him, as both the great magnate on his
native heath, and as the trained man of affairs condescending to a
girl's fancies. But she had made up her mind not to be afraid.

"What tales have you heard?" she asked him.

"You alarm us, you know," he said gallantly, waiving her question. "We
can't afford a prophetess to the other side, just now."

Miss Raeburn drew herself up, with a sharp dry look at Miss Boyce, which
escaped every one but Lady Winterbourne.

"Oh! I am not a Radical!" said Marcella, half scornfully. "We
Socialists don't fight for either political party as such. We take what
we can get out of both."

"So you call yourself a Socialist? A real full-blown one?"

Lord Maxwell's pleasant tone masked the mood of a man who after a
morning of hard work thinks himself entitled to some amusement at
luncheon.

"Yes, I am a Socialist," she said slowly, looking at him. "At least I
ought to be--I am in my conscience."

"But not in your judgment?" he said laughing. "Isn't that the condition
of most of us?"

"No, not at all!" she exclaimed, both her vanity and her enthusiasm
roused by his manner. "Both my judgment and my conscience make me a
Socialist. It's only one's wretched love for one's own little luxuries
and precedences--the worst part of one--that makes me waver, makes me a
traitor! The people I worked with in London would think me a traitor
often, I know."

"And you really think that the world ought to be 'hatched over again and
hatched different'? That it ought to be, if it could be?"

"I think that things are intolerable as they are," she broke out, after
a pause. "The London poor were bad enough; the country poor seem to me
worse! How can any one believe that such serfdom and poverty--such
mutilation of mind and body--were meant to go on for ever!"

Lord Maxwell's brows lifted. But it certainly was no wonder that Aldous
should find those eyes of hers superb?

"Can you really imagine, my dear young lady," he asked her