“He’s not much of a talker, our Nehemiah,” said Hallin, smiling; “but he has the most extraordinary power as a speaker over a large popular audience that I have ever seen.  The man’s honesty is amazing,—­it’s his tempers and his jealousies get in his way.  You astonished him; but, for the matter of that, you astonished Frank and me still more!”

And as he fell back into his chair, Marcella caught a flash of expression, a tone that somehow put her on her defence.

“I was not going to listen to such unjust stuff without a word.  Politics is one thing—­slanderous abuse is another!” she said, throwing back her head with a gesture which instantly brought back to Hallin the scene in the Mellor drawing-room, when she had denounced the game-laws and Wharton had scored his first point.

He was silent, feeling a certain inner exasperation with women and their ways.

“‘She only did it to annoy,’” cried Frank Leven; “’because she knows it teases.’ We know very well what she thinks of us.  But where did you get it all from, Miss Boyce?  I just wish you’d tell me.  There’s a horrid Radical in the House I’m always having rows with—­and upon my word I didn’t know there was half so much to be said for us!”

Marcella flushed.

“Never mind where I got it!” she said.

In reality, of course, it was from those Agricultural Reports she had worked through the year before under Wharton’s teaching, with so much angry zest, and to such different purpose.

* * * * *

When the door closed upon her and upon Frank Leven, who was to escort her home, Hallin walked quickly over to the table, and stood looking for a moment in a sort of bitter reverie at Raeburn’s photograph.

His sister followed him, and laid her hand on his shoulder.

“Do go to bed, Edward!  I am afraid that talk has tired you dreadfully.”

“It would be no good going to bed, dear,” he said, with a sigh of exhaustion.  “I will sit and read a bit, and see if I can get myself into sleeping trim.  But you go, Alice—­good-night.”

When she had gone he threw himself into his chair again with the thought—­“She must contradict here as she contradicted there! She—­and justice!  If she could have been just to a landlord for one hour last year—­”

He spent himself for a while in endless chains of recollection, oppressed by the clearness of his own brain, and thirsting for sleep.  Then from the affairs of Raeburn and Marcella, he passed with a fresh sense of strain and effort to his own.  That discussion with those four men which had filled the first part of the evening weighed upon him in his weakness of nerve, so that suddenly in the phantom silence of the night, all life became an oppression and a terror, and rest, either to-night or in the future, a thing never to be his.