e it at once, for after a look or two at him and a word, she
subsided into silence behind her plate.

It was a pleasant little room in which they sat, immediately behind
Oliver's own, and was furnished, according to universal custom, in light
green. Its windows looked out upon a strip of garden at the back, and
the high creeper-grown wall that separated that domain from the next.
The furniture, too, was of the usual sort; a sensible round table stood
in the middle, with three tall arm-chairs, with the proper angles and
rests, drawn up to it; and the centre of it, resting apparently on a
broad round column, held the dishes. It was thirty years now since the
practice of placing the dining-room above the kitchen, and of raising
and lowering the courses by hydraulic power into the centre of the
dining-table, had become universal in the houses of the well-to-do. The
floor consisted entirely of the asbestos cork preparation invented in
America, noiseless, clean, and pleasant to both foot and eye.

Mabel broke the silence.

"And your speech to-morrow?" she asked, taking up her fork.

Oliver brightened a little, and began to discourse.

It seemed that Birmingham was beginning to fret. They were crying out
once more for free trade with America: European facilities were not
enough, and it was Oliver's business to keep them quiet. It was useless,
he proposed to tell them, to agitate until the Eastern business was
settled: they must not bother the Government with such details just now.
He was to tell them, too, that the Government was wholly on their side;
that it was bound to come soon.

"They are pig-headed," he added fiercely; "pig-headed and selfish; they
are like children who cry for food ten minutes before dinner-time: it is
bound to come if they will wait a little."

"And you will tell them so?"

"That they are pig-headed? Certainly."

Mabel looked at her husband with a pleased twinkle in her eyes. She knew
perfectly well that his popularity rested largely on his outspokenness:
folks liked to be scolded and abused by a genial bold man who danced and
gesticulated in a magnetic fury; she liked it herself.

"How shall you go?" she asked.

"Volor. I shall catch the eighteen o'clock at Blackfriars; the meeting
is at nineteen, and I shall be back at twenty-one."

He addressed himself vigorously to his _entree_, and his mother looked
up with a patient, old-woman smile.

Mabel began to drum her fingers softly on the d