and brothers, amid the rattle of the machines and the steam of the
pressers' irons, with the sick or the dying, perhaps, in the bed beside
them, and their blanched children at their feet--sights of this sort,
thus translated from the commonplace of reports and newspapers into a
poignant, unsavoury truth, had at least this effect--they vastly
quickened the personal melancholy of the spectator, they raised and drove
home a number of piercing questions which, probably, George Tressady
would never have raised, and would have lived happily without raising, if
it had not been for a woman, and a woman's charm.

For that woman's _solutions_ remained as doubtful to him as ever. He
would go back to that strange little house where she kept her strange
court, meet her eager eyes, and be roused at once to battle. How they had
argued! He knew that she had less hope than ever of persuading him even
to modify his view of the points at issue between the Government and his
own group. She could not hope for a moment that any act of his would be
likely to stand between Maxwell and defeat. He had not talked of his
adventures to Fontenoy--would rather, indeed, that Fontenoy knew nothing
of them. But he and she knew that Fontenoy, so far, had little to fear
from them.

And yet she had not turned from him. To her personal mood, to her wifely
affection even, he must appear more plainly than ever as the callous and
selfish citizen, ready and glad to take his own ease while his brethren
perished. He had been sceptical and sarcastic; he had declined to accept
her evidence; he had shown a persistent preference for the drier and more
brutal estimate of things. Yet she had never parted from him without
gentleness, without a look in her beautiful eyes that had often
tormented his curiosity. What did it mean? Pity? Or some unspoken comment
of a personal kind she could not persuade her womanly reticence to put