“Well, I’m glad you think I did decently,” he said, as they mounted the hotel stairs.  “What a beastly day, and how stuffy that hall was!  Come in and have something to drink.”

He threw open the door of his sitting-room as he spoke.  The four men with him followed him in.

“I must go back to the hall to see two or three men before everybody disperses,” said the one in front.  “No refreshment for me, thank you, Mr. Wharton.  But I want to ask a question—­what arrangements have you made for the reporting of your speech?”

The man who spoke was thin and dark, with a modest kindly eye.  He wore a black frock coat, and had the air of a minister.

“Oh, thank you, Bennett, it’s all right.  The Post, the Chronicle, and the Northern Guardian will have full copies.  I sent them off before the meeting.  And my own paper, of course.  As to the rest they may report it as they like.  I don’t care.”

“They’ll all have it,” said another man, bluntly.  “It’s the best speech you’ve ever made—­the best president’s speech we’ve had yet, I say,—­don’t you think so?”

The speaker, a man called Casey, turned to the two men behind him.  Both nodded.

“Hallin’s speech last year was first-rate,” he continued, “but somehow Hallin damps you down, at least he did me last year; what you want just now is fight—­and, my word!  Mr. Wharton let ’em have it!”

And standing with his hands on his sides, he glanced round from one to another.  His own face was flushed, partly from the effects of a crowded hall and bad air, but mostly with excitement.  All the men present indeed—­though it was less evident in Bennett and Wharton than in the rest—­had the bright nervous look which belongs to leaders keenly conscious of standing well with the led, and of having just emerged successfully from an agitating ordeal.  As they stood together they went over the speech to which they had been listening, and the scene which had followed it, in a running stream of talk, laughter, and gossip.  Wharton took little part, except to make a joke occasionally at his own expense, but the pleasure on his smiling lip, and in his roving, contented eye was not to be mistaken.  The speech he had just delivered had been first thought out as he paced the moonlit library and corridor at Mellor.  After Marcella had left him, and he was once more in his own room, he had had the extraordinary self-control to write it out, and make two or three machine-copies of it for the press.  Neither its range nor its logical order had suffered for that intervening experience.  The programme of labour for the next five years had never been better presented, more boldly planned, more eloquently justified.  Hallin’s presidential speech of the year before, as Casey said, rang flat in the memory when compared with it.  Wharton knew that he had made a mark, and knew also that his speech had given him the whip-hand of some fellows who would otherwise have stood in his way.