nprincipled. For what do you suppose men went into the Town Council? To
represent the ratepayer, the townspeople? No, but to look after their
own interests; to safeguard themselves; to get what they could out of
it: the whole policy of the old councils was one of--there's only one
word for it, Mr. Brent, and that's only just becoming Anglicized--Graft!
Now, the Corporation of a town is supposed to exist for the good, the
welfare, the protection of a town, but the whole idea of these
Hathelsborough men, in the past, has been to use their power and
privileges as administrators, for their own ends. So here you've had, on
the one hand, the unfortunate ratepayer and, on the other, a close
Corporation, a privileged band of pirates, battening on them. In plain
words, there are about a hundred men in Hathelsborough who have used the
seven or eight thousand other folk as a means to their own ends. The
town has been a helpless, defenceless thing, from which these harpies
have picked whatever they could lay their talons on!"

"That's the conclusion he'd come to?" asked Brent.

"He couldn't come to any other after many years of patient
investigation," declared Mrs. Saumarez. "And he was the sort of man who
had an inborn hatred of abuses and shams and hypocrisy! And now put it
to yourself--when a man stands up against vested interests, such as
exist here, and says plainly that he's never going to rest, nor leave a
stone unturned, until he's made a radical and thorough reformation, do
you think he's going to have a primrose path of it? Bah! But _he_ knew!
He knew his danger."

"But--murder?" said Brent. "Murder!"

Mrs. Saumarez shook her head.

"Yes," she answered. "But there are men in this place who wouldn't stick
at even that! You don't know. If Wallingford had done all the things
he'd vowed to do, there would have been such an exposure of affairs here
as would have made the whole country agape. And some men would have been
ruined--literally. I know! And things will come out and be tracked down,
if no red herrings are drawn across the trail. You're going to get at
the truth?"

"By God, yes!" exclaimed Brent, with sudden fervour. "I am so!"

"Look for his murderers amongst the men he intended to show up, then!"
she said, with a certain fierce intensity. "And look closely--and
secretly! There's no other way!"

Brent presently left her and went off wondering about the contents of
the little cabinet. He would have wondered st