“Somebody must be sent down at once,” he said to himself.  “I suppose,” he added, with discontent, “it must be Wilkins.”

For the man who had written the articles for the Labour Clarion, as Special Commissioner, had some three weeks before left England to take command of a colonial newspaper.

Still pondering, he took up the other letters, turned them over—­childishly pleased for the thousandth time by the M.P. on each envelope and the number and variety of his correspondence—­and eagerly chose out three—­one from his bankers, one from his Lincolnshire agent, and one from the Clarion office, undoubtedly this time in Wilkins’s hand.

He read them, grew a little pale, swore under his breath, and, angrily flinging the letters away from him, he took up his cigarette again and thought.

The letter from his bankers asked his attention in stiff terms to a largely overdrawn account, and entirely declined to advance a sum of money for which he had applied to them without the guarantee of two substantial names in addition to his own.  The letter from his agent warned him that the extraordinary drought of the past six weeks, together with the general agricultural depression, would certainly mean a large remission of rents at the June quarter day, and also informed him that the holders of his co-operative farm would not be able to pay their half-yearly interest on the capital advanced to them by the landlord.

As to the third letter, it was in truth much more serious than the two others.  Wilkins, the passionate and suspicious workman, of great natural ability, who had been in many ways a thorn in Wharton’s side since the beginning of his public career, was now member for a mining constituency.  His means of support were extremely scanty, and at the opening of the new Parliament Wharton had offered him well-paid work on the Clarion newspaper.  It had seemed to the proprietor of the Clarion a way of attaching a dangerous man to himself, perhaps also of controlling him.  Wilkins had grudgingly accepted, understanding perfectly well what was meant.

Since then the relation between the two men had been one of perpetual friction.  Wilkins’s irritable pride would yield nothing, either in the House or in the Clarion office, to Wharton’s university education and class advantages, while Wharton watched with alarm the growing influence of this insubordinate and hostile member of his own staff on those labour circles from which the Clarion drew its chief support.

In the letter he had just read Wilkins announced to the proprietor of the Clarion that in consequence of the “scandalous mismanagement” of that paper’s handling of a certain trade arbitration which had just closed, he, Wilkins, could no longer continue to write for it, and begged to terminate his engagement at once, there being no formal agreement between himself and Wharton as to length of notice on either side.  A lively attack on the present management and future prospects of the Clarion followed, together with the threat that the writer would do what in him lay henceforward to promote the cause of a certain rival organ lately started, among such working men as he might be able to influence.