* * *

Three hundred and thirty women and twenty men waited in the Banquet Hall
to receive the prisoners.

The high galleries were festooned with the red, white and blue of the
Women's Franchise Union, and hung with flags and blazoned banners. The
silk standards and the emblems of the Women's Suffrage Leagues and
Societies, supported by their tall poles, stood ranged along three
walls. They covered the sham porphyry with gorgeous and heroic colours,
purple and blue, sky-blue and sapphire blue and royal blue, black, white
and gold, vivid green, pure gold, pure white, dead-black, orange and
scarlet and magenta.

From the high table under the windows streamed seven dependent tables
decorated with nosegays of red, white and blue flowers. In the centre of
the high table three arm-chairs, draped with the tricolour, were set
like three thrones for the three leaders. They were flanked by nine
other chairs on the right and nine on the left for the eighteen other
prisoners.

There was a slight rustling sound at the side door leading to the high
table. It was followed by a thicker and more prolonged sound of rustling
as the three hundred and fifty turned in their places.

The twenty-one prisoners came in.

A great surge of white, spotted with red and blue, heaved itself up in
the hall to meet them as the three hundred and fifty rose to their feet.

And from the three hundred and fifty there went up a strange, a savage
and a piercing collective sound, where a clear tinkling as of glass or
thin metal, and a tearing as of silk, and a crying as of children and of
small, slender-throated animals were held together by ringing,
vibrating, overtopping tones as of violins playing in the treble. And
now a woman's voice started off on its own note and tore the delicate
tissue of this sound with a solitary scream; and now a man's voice
filled up a pause in the shrill hurrahing with a solitary boom.

To Dorothea, in her triumphal seat at Angela Blathwaite's right hand, to
Michael and Nicholas and Veronica in their places among the crowd, that
collective sound was frightful.

From her high place Dorothea could see Michael and Nicholas, one on each
side of Veronica, just below her. At the same table, facing them, she
saw her three aunts, Louie, Emmeline and Edith.

It was from Emmeline that those lacerating screams arose.

* * * * *

The breakfast and the speeches of the prisoners were ove