It was a matter on which Hallin was also well-informed, and felt strongly.  They stayed talking about it a few minutes, Hallin eagerly directing Raeburn’s attention to the two or three points where he thought the Government could really do good.

Then Raeburn turned to go.

“I shall come and drag you out to-morrow afternoon,” he said, as he opened the door.

“You needn’t,” said Hallin, with a smile; “in fact, don’t; I shall have my jaunt.”

Whereby Aldous understood that he would be engaged in his common Saturday practice of taking out a batch of elder boys or girls from one or other of the schools of which he was manager, for a walk or to see some sight.

“If it’s your boys,” he said, protesting, “you’re not fit for it.  Hand them over to me.”

“Nothing of the sort,” said Hallin, gaily, and turned him out of the room.

* * * * *

Raeburn found the walk from Hallin’s Bloomsbury quarters to Drury Lane hot and airless.  The planes were already drooping and yellowing in the squares, the streets were at their closest and dirtiest, and the traffic of Holborn and its approaches had never seemed to him more bewildering in its roar and volume.  July was in, and all freshness had already disappeared from the too short London summer.

For Raeburn on this particular afternoon there was a curious forlornness in the dry and tainted air.  His slack mood found no bracing in the sun or the breeze.  Everything was or seemed distasteful to a mind out of tune—­whether this work he was upon, which only yesterday had interested him considerably, or his Parliamentary occupations, or some tiresome estate business which would have to be looked into when he got home.  He was oppressed, too, by the last news of his grandfather.  The certainty that this dear and honoured life, with which his own had been so closely intertwined since his boyhood, was drawing to its close weighed upon him now heavily and constantly.  The loss itself would take from him an object on which affection—­checked and thwarted elsewhere—­was still free to spend itself in ways peculiarly noble and tender; and as for those other changes to which the first great change must lead—­his transference to the Upper House, and the extension for himself of all the ceremonial side of life—­he looked forward to them with an intense and resentful repugnance, as to aggravations, perversely thrust on him from without, of a great and necessary grief.  Few men believed less happily in democracy than Aldous Raeburn; on the other hand, few men felt a more steady distaste for certain kinds of inequality.

He was to meet a young inspector at the corner of Little Queen Street, and they were to visit together a series of small brush-drawing and box-making workshops in the Drury Lane district, to which the attention of the Department had lately been specially drawn.  Aldous had no sooner crossed Holborn than he saw his man waiting for him, a tall strip of a fellow, with a dark bearded face, and a manner which shyness had made a trifle morose.  Aldous, however, knew him to be not only a capital worker, but a man of parts, and had got much information and some ideas out of him already.  Mr. Peabody gave the under-secretary a slight preoccupied smile in return for his friendly greeting, and the two walked on together talking.