“The tragedy of life lies in the conflict between the creative will of man and the hidden wisdom of the world, which seems to thwart it.”  These words, written by one whose thought had penetrated deep into his own, rang in his ears as he sat brooding there.  Not the hidden fate, or the hidden evil, but the hidden wisdom.  Could one die and still believe it?  Yet what else was the task of faith?

CHAPTER VI.

“So I understand you wish me to go down at once?” said Louis Craven.  “This is Friday—­say Monday?”

Wharton nodded.  He and Craven were sitting in Marcella’s little sitting-room.  Their hostess and Edith Craven had escaped through the door in the back kitchen communicating with the Hurds’ tenement, so that the two men might be left alone a while.  The interview between them had gone smoothly, and Louis Craven had accepted immediate employment on the Labour Clarion, as the paper’s correspondent in the Midlands, with special reference to the important strike just pending.  Wharton, whose tendency in matters of business was always to go rather further than he had meant to go, for the sake generally of making an impression on the man with whom he was dealing, had spoken of a two years’ engagement, and had offered two hundred a year.  So far as that went, Craven was abundantly satisfied.

“And I understand from you,” he said, “that the paper goes in for the strike, that you will fight it through?”

He fixed his penetrating greenish eyes on his companion.  Louis Craven was now a tall man with narrow shoulders, a fine oval head and face, delicate features, and a nervous look of short sight, producing in appearance and manner a general impression of thin grace and of a courtesy which was apt to pass unaccountably into sarcasm.  Wharton had never felt himself personally at ease with him, either now, or in the old days of Venturist debates.

“Certainly, we shall fight it through,” Wharton replied, with emphasis—­“I have gone through the secretary’s statement, which I now hand over to you, and I never saw a clearer case.  The poor wretches have been skinned too long; it is high time the public backed them up.  There are two of the masters in the House.  Denny, I should say, belonged quite to the worst type of employer going.”

He spoke with light venom, buttoning his coat as he spoke with the air of the busy public man who must not linger over an appointment.

“Oh!  Denny!” said Craven, musing; “yes, Denny is a hard man, but a just one according to his lights.  There are plenty worse than he.”

Wharton was disagreeably reminded of the Venturist habit of never accepting anything that was said quite as it stood—­of not, even in small things, “swearing to the words” of anybody.  He was conscious of the quick passing feeling that his judgment, with regard to Denny, ought to have been enough for Craven.