would very soon bring disaster."

Julian glanced at the clock and rose to his feet.

"I don't want to hurry any one," he said, "but my father is rather a
martinet about luncheon."

They all rose. Mr. Stenson turned to Julian.

"Will you go on with Miss Abbeway?" he begged. "I will catch up with you
on the marshes. I want to have just a word with Furley."

Julian and his companion crossed the country road and passed through the
gate opposite on to the rude track which led down almost to the sea.

"You are very interested in English labour questions, Miss Abbeway," he
remarked, "considering that you are only half an Englishwoman."

"It isn't only the English labouring classes in whom I am interested,"
she replied impatiently. "It is the cause of the people throughout the
whole of the world which in my small way I preach."

"Your own country," he continued, a little diffidently, "is scarcely a
good advertisement for the cause of social reform."

Her tone trembled with indignation as she answered him.

"My own country," she said, "has suffered for so many centuries from
such terrible oppression that the reaction was bound, in its first
stages, to produce nothing but chaos. Automatically, all that seems to
you unreasonable, wicked even, in a way, horrible--will in the course
of time disappear. Russia will find herself. In twenty years' time her
democracy will have solved the great problem, and Russia be the foremost
republic of the world."

"Meanwhile," he remarked, "she is letting us down pretty badly."

"But you are selfish, you English!" she exclaimed. "You see one of the
greatest nations in the world going through its hour of agony, and you
think nothing but how you yourselves will be affected! Every thinking
person in Russia regrets that this thing should have come to pass at
such a time. Yet it is best for you English to look the truth in the
face. It wasn't the Russian people who were pledged to you, with whom
you were bound in alliance. It was that accursed trick all European
politicians have of making secret treaties and secret understandings,
building up buffer States, trying to whittle away a piece of the map for
yourselves, trying all the time to be dishonest under the shadow of what
is called diplomacy. That is what brought the war about. It was never
the will of the people. It was the Hohenzollerns and the Romanoffs,
the firebrands of the French Cabinet, and your own clumsy, thick-headed
efforts to