n
asked.

"I am afraid my father is rather old-fashioned," Julian confessed.

"You are all old-fashioned--and stiff with prejudice," Furley declared.
"Even Orden," he went on, turning to Catherine, "only tolerates me
because we ate dinners off the same board when we were both making up
our minds to be Lord High Chancellor."

"Our friend Furley," Julian confided, as he leaned across the table and
took a cigarette, "has no tact and many prejudices. He does write such
rubbish about the aristocracy. I remember an article of his not very
long ago, entitled `Out with our Peers!' It's all very well for a
younger son like me to take it lying down, but you could scarcely expect
my father to approve. Besides, I believe the fellow's a renegade. I have
an idea that he was born in the narrower circles himself."

"That's where you're wrong, then," Furley grunted with satisfaction. "My
father was a boot manufacturer in a country village of Leicestershire. I
went in for the Bar because he left me pots of money, most of which, by
the bye, I seem to have dissipated."

"Chiefly in Utopian schemes for the betterment of his betters," Julian
observed drily.

"I certainly had an idea," Furley confessed, "of an asylum for incapable
younger sons."

"I call a truce," Julian proposed. "It isn't polite to spar before Miss
Abbeway."

"To me," Mr. Stenson declared, "this is a veritable temple of peace. I
arrived here literally on all fours. Miss Abbeway has proved to me quite
conclusively that as a democratic leader I have missed my vocation."

She looked at him reproachfully. Nevertheless, his words seemed to
have brought back to her mind the thrill of their brief but stimulating
conversation. A flash of genuine earnestness transformed her face, just
as a gleam of wintry sunshine, which had found its way in through the
open window, seemed to discover threads of gold in her tightly braided
and luxuriant brown hair. Her eyes filled with an almost inspired light:

"Mr. Stenson is scarcely fair to me," she complained. "I did not presume
to criticise his statesmanship, only there are some things here which
seem pitiful. England should be the ideal democracy of the world. Your
laws admit of it, your Government admits of it. Neither birth nor money
are indispensable to success. The way is open for the working man to
pass even to the Cabinet. And you are nothing of the sort. The cause of
the people is not in any country so shamefully and badly