angrily, "but what I say is that we are listening to the most dangerous
stuff any man ever spouted. What's to become of us, I'd like to know,
with a revolution in the country?"

"You would probably lose your jobs," Maraton answered calmly. "What
does it matter? There are others to follow you. The first whom the
people will turn upon will be those who have pulled down the pillars.
Our names will be hated by every one of them. What does it matter? It
is for their good."

Peter Dale doubled up his fist and once more he smote the table before
him.

"I am dead against you, Maraton," he announced. "Put that in your pipe
and smoke it. If you go to Newcastle, I go there to fight you. If you
go to any of the places in this country represented by us, our Member
will be there to fight. We are in Parliament to do our best for the
people we represent, bit by bit as we can. We are not there to plunge
the country into a revolution and run the risk of a foreign invasion.
There isn't one of us Englishmen here who'll agree with you or side with
you for one moment."

"Hear, hear!" they all echoed.

"Not one," Graveling interposed, "and for my part, I go further. I say
that the man who stands there and talks about the risk of a foreign
invasion like that, is no Englishman. I call him a traitor, and if the
thing comes he speaks of, may he be hung from the nearest lamp-post!
That's all I've got to say."

Maraton opened his lips and closed them again. He looked slowly down
that wall of blank, unsympathetic faces and he merely shrugged his
shoulders. Words were wasted upon them.

"Very well, gentlemen," he said, "let it be war. Perhaps we'd better
let this be the end of our deliberations."

Graveling rose slowly to his feet. His face was filled with evil
things. He pointed to Maraton.

"There's a word more to be spoken!" he exclaimed. "There's more behind
this scheme of Maraton's than he's willing to have us understand! It
looks to me and it sounds to me like a piece of dirty, underhand
business. I'll ask you a question, Maraton. Were you at the Ritz Hotel
one night about two months ago, with the ambassador of a foreign a
country?"

"I was," Maraton admitted coolly.

Graveling looked around with a little cry of triumph.

"It's a plot, this; nothing more nor less than a plot!" he declared
vigorously. "What sort of an Englishman does he call himself, I wonder?
It's the foreigners that are at the bottom of the lot of it! They wan