and blood out of a hundred
of her children, day by day."

A servant brought in tea, delightfully served. There were small yellow
china cups, pale tea with a faint, aromatic odour, thick cream,
strawberries and cakes.

"If only you would appreciate it," she declared, "you are really rather
a privileged person. No one has tea with me here."

"I do appreciate it," he assured her, "perhaps more than you think."

There was a moment's silence. As he was taking his cup from her
fingers, their eyes met, and she looked away again almost immediately.

"I wish," she said, "that you would tell me more about yourself--what
you did in America, what your life has been? You are rather a
mysterious person, aren't you?"

"In a sense, perhaps, I must seem so," he admitted. "You see, I was an
orphan very early. There wasn't any one who cared how I grew up, and I
wandered a good deal. The earlier part of my life I was over here--I
was at Heidelberg University, bye the bye--and in Paris for two years
studying art, of all things! Then something--I don't know what it
was--called me to America, and I found it hard to come back. It's a big
country, you know, Lady Elisabeth. It gets hold of you. If it hadn't
driven me out, I doubt whether I should ever have left it."

"But what was it first inspired you with this--well, wouldn't you call
it a passion--for championing the cause of the people?"

He shook his head.

"Born in me, I suppose. I have watched them, lived with them, and then
I have been through the whole gamut of Socialistic literature. It is
not worth reading, most of it. The essential facts are there to look
at, half-a-dozen phrases, a single field of view. It's all very
simple."

"Now I am going to ask you something else," she went on. "That first
night when we talked together, you seemed so full of hope, so dauntless.
Since then, is it my fancy--since you came back from Manchester--are you
a little disappointed 'with life? Don't you know in your heart that
you've done what's best?"

"I wish I did," he answered simply. "My common sense tells me that I
have chosen well, and then sometimes, in the nights, or when I am alone,
other thoughts come to me, and I feel almost as though I had been
faithless, as though I had simply chosen the easier way. Look how
pleasant it is all being made for me! I am no longer an outcast; I bask
in the sun of your uncle's patronage; people ask me to dinner, seek my
friendship, people whom I fe