ed--knew that he spoke the living, vital truth. "Why this
persecution, this plotting, this labor and expense to 'get' me. Do you
want to know?"

"Yes, tell me!" she whispered. "I don't understand. I can't! It--it all
seems so horrible, so unreal, so--so different from what I've always
believed about the majesty and purity of the law! Can these things be,
indeed?"

He laughed bitterly.

"Can they?" he repeated. "When you see that they _are_, isn't that
answer enough? And the reason of it all is that I'm a Socialist and know
certain secrets of certain men, which--if I should tell the
world--might, nay, surely would precipitate a revolution. So, these men,
and the System behind them, have tried to discredit me by this foul
charge. After this, if the charge sticks, I may shout my head off,
exposing what I know; and who will listen? You know the answer as well
as I! Do I complain? No, not once! What I must suffer, for this
wondrous Cause, is not a tenth what thousands suffer every day, in
silence and high courage. What has happened to me, personally, is but
the merest trifle beside what has already happened to thousands,
fighting for life and liberty, for wife and home and children; for the
right to work and live like men, not beasts!"

"You mean the--the working class?" she ventured, wonderingly. "Is this
outrage really a minor one, compared with what they, who feed and warm
and carry the whole world, have to suffer? Tell me, for I--God help me,
I am ignorant! I am beginning to see, to half-see, awful, dim, ghostly
shapes of huge, unspeakable wrongs. Tell me the truth about all this, as
you have told it about yourself--and let me know!"

Then Gabriel talked as never he had talked before. To this, his audience
of one, there in the dirty and ill-smelling police station, he unfolded
the sad tale of the disinherited, the enslaved, the wretched, as never
to a huge, and spell-bound audience in hall or park or city street. His
eloquence, always convincing, now became sublime.

With master strokes he painted vast outlines of the whole sad
picture--the System based on robbery and fraud and exploitation; its
natural results in millionaire and tramp and harlot and degenerate; the
crime of armies of unemployed and starving men, of millions of women
forced into the factories and shops, there to compete with men and lower
wages and lose their finest feminine attributes in the sordid and
heartless drudging for a pittance.

He tol