Mr. Boyce talked recklessly of going too.

“Of course, I know he will spout seditious nonsense,” he said irritably to his wife, “but it’s the fellow’s power of talk that is so astonishing. He isn’t troubled with your Raeburn heaviness.”

Marcella came into the room as the discussion was going on.

“If papa goes,” she said in an undertone to her mother as she passed her, “it will spoil the meeting.  The labourers will turn sulky.  I shouldn’t wonder if they did or said something unpleasant.  As it is, you had much better not come, mamma.  They are sure to attack the cottages—­and other things.”

Mrs. Boyce took no notice as far as she herself was concerned, but her quiet decision at last succeeded in leaving Mr. Boyce safely settled by the fire, provided as usual with a cigarette and a French novel.

The meeting was held in a little iron Baptist chapel, erected some few years before on the outskirts of the village, to the grief and scandal of Mr. Harden.  There were about a hundred and twenty labourers present, and at the back some boys and girls, come to giggle and make a noise—­nobody else.  The Baptist minister, a smooth-faced young man, possessed, as it turned out, of opinions little short of Wharton’s own in point of vigour and rigour, was already in command.  A few late comers, as they slouched in, stole side looks at Marcella and the veiled lady in black beside her, sitting in the corner of the last bench; and Marcella nodded to one or two of the audience, Jim Hurd amongst them.  Otherwise no one took any notice of them.  It was the first time that Mrs. Boyce had been inside any building belonging to the village.

Wharton arrived late.  He had been canvassing at a distance, and neither of the Mellor ladies had seen him all day.  He slipped up the bench with a bow and a smile to greet them.  “I am done!” he said to Marcella, as he took off his hat.  “My voice is gone, my mind ditto.  I shall drivel for half an hour and let them go.  Did you ever see such a stolid set?”

“You will rouse them,” said Marcella.

Her eyes were animated, her colour high, and she took no account at all of his plea of weariness.

“You challenge me?  I must rouse them—­that was what you came to see?  Is that it?”

She laughed and made no answer.  He left her and went up to the minister’s desk, the men shuffling their feet a little, and rattling a stick here and there as he did so.

The young minister took the chair and introduced the speaker.  He had a strong Yorkshire accent, and his speech was divided between the most vehement attacks, couched in the most Scriptural language, upon capital and privilege—­that is to say, on landlords and the land system, on State churches and the “idle rich,” interspersed with quavering returns upon himself, as though he were scared by his own invective.  “My brothers, let us be calm!” he would say after every burst of passion, with a long deep-voiced emphasis on the last word; “let us, above all things, be calm!”—­and then bit by bit voice and denunciation would begin to mount again towards a fresh climax of loud-voiced attack, only to sink again to the same lamb-like refrain.  Mrs. Boyce’s thin lip twitched, and Marcella bore the good gentleman a grudge for providing her mother with so much unnecessary amusement.