had
their opportunity. I walked the streets openly, I travelled to New York
openly, I took my steamer ticket to England under my own name. The
papers, I believe, chronicled every stage of my journey."

"It was disgraceful!" she declared. "The people in office over there
are cowards."

"Not at all," he objected. "They were very well advised. They acted
with shrewd common sense. America is no better prepared for a
revolution than England is."

"Do you imagine," she demanded, her voice trembling, "that you will be
permitted to repeat in this country your American exploits?"

Maraton smiled a little sadly.

"Need we discuss these things, Lady Elisabeth?"

"Yes, we need!" she replied promptly. "This is my one opportunity. You
and I will probably never exchange another word so long as we live. I
have read your book--every word of it. I have read it several times.
In that book you have shown just as much of yourself as you chose, and
no more. Although I have hated the idea that I might ever have to speak
to you, now that you are here, now that it has come to pass, I am going
to ask you a question."

He sighed.

"People ask me so many questions!"

"Tell me this," she continued, without heeding his interruption. "Do
you, in your heart, believe that you are justified in going about the
world preaching your hateful doctrines, seeking out the toilers only to
fill them with discontent and to set them against their employers,
preaching everywhere bloodshed and anarchy, inflaming the minds of
people who in ordinary times are contented, even happy? You have made
yourself feared and hated in every country of the world. You have
brought America almost to the verge of revolution. And now, just when
England needs peace most, when affairs on the Continent are so
threatening and every one connected with the Government of the country
is passing through a time of the gravest anxiety, you intend, they say,
to start a campaign here. You say that you love the truth. Answer me
this question truthfully, then. Do you believe that you are justified?"

He had listened to her at first with a slight, tolerant smile upon his
lips, a smile which faded gradually away. He was sombre, almost stern,
when she had finished. He seemed in some curious way to have assumed a
larger shape, to have become more imposing. His attitude had a strange
and indefinable influence upon her.

She was suddenly conscious of her youth and inexperience--bitterly and