“MARCELLA BOYCE.”

Wharton laid down the letter, making a wry mouth over some of its phrases.

“‘Put us both wrong with honour and conscience.’  ’One more reason for despair of life’—­’All was over for me at Mellor’—­dear! dear!—­how women like the big words—­the emphatic pose.  All those little odds and ends of charities—­that absurd straw-plaiting scheme!  Well, perhaps one could hardly expect her to show a sense of humour just then.  But why does nature so often leave it out in these splendid creatures?”

“Hullo!” he added, as he bent over the table to look for a pen; “why didn’t that idiot give me these?”

For there, under an evening paper which he had not touched, lay a pile of unopened letters.  His servant had forgotten to point them out to him.  On the top was a letter on which Wharton pounced at once.  It was addressed in a bold inky hand, and he took it to be from Nehemiah Wilkins, M.P., his former colleague at the Birmingham Labour Congress, of late a member of the Labour Clarion staff, and as such a daily increasing plague and anxiety to the Clarion’s proprietor.

However, the letter was not from Wilkins.  It was from the secretary of a Midland trades-union, with whom Wharton had already been in communication.  The union was recent, and represented the as yet feeble organisation of a metal industry in process of transition from the home-workshop to the full factory, or Great Industry stage.  The conditions of work were extremely bad, and grievances many; wages were low, and local distress very great.  The secretary, a young man of ability and enthusiasm, wrote to Wharton to say that certain alterations in the local “payment lists” lately made by the employers amounted to a reduction of wages; that the workers, beginning to feel the heartening effects of their union, were determined not to submit; that bitter and even desperate agitation was spreading fast, and that a far-reaching strike was imminent.  Could they count on the support of the Clarion?  The Clarion had already published certain letters on the industry from a Special Commissioner—­letters which had drawn public attention, and had been eagerly read in the district itself.  Would the Clarion now “go in” for them?  Would Mr. Wharton personally support them, in or out of Parliament, and get his friends to do the same?  To which questions, couched in terms extremely flattering to the power of the Clarion and its owner, the secretary appended a long and technical statement of the situation.

Wharton looked up from the letter with a kindling eye.  He foresaw an extremely effective case, both for the newspaper and the House of Commons.  One of the chief capitalists involved was a man called Denny, who had been long in the House, for whom the owner of the Clarion entertained a strong personal dislike.  Denny had thwarted him vexatiously—­had perhaps even made him ridiculous—­on one or two occasions; and Wharton saw no reason whatever for forgiving one’s enemies until, like Narvaez, one had “shot them all.”  There would be much satisfaction in making Denny understand who were his masters.  And with these motives there mingled a perfectly genuine sympathy with the “poor devils” in question, and a desire to see them righted.