“Will you tell me what made you do this?” she asked, not being able to think of anything else to say.

He opened his eyes with a start.

In that instant’s quiet the scene he had just lived through had been rushing before him again—­the long table in the panelled committee-room, the keen angry faces gathered about it.  Bennett, in his blue tie and shabby black coat, the clear moist eyes vexed and miserable—­Molloy, small and wiry, business-like in the midst of confusion, cool in the midst of tumult—­and Wilkins, a black, hectoring leviathan, thundering on the table as he flung his broad Yorkshire across it, or mouthing out Denny’s letter in the midst of the sudden electrical silence of some thirty amazed and incredulous hearers.

“Spies, yo call us?” with a finger like a dart, threatening the enemy—­“Aye; an’ yo’re aboot reet!  I and my friends—­we have been trackin’ and spyin’ for weeks past.  We knew those men, those starvin’ women and bairns, were bein’ sold, but we couldn’t prove it.  Now we’ve come at the how and the why of it!  And we’ll make it harder for men like you to sell ’em again!  Yo call it infamy?—­well, we call it detection.”

Then rattling on the inner ear came the phrases of the attack which followed on the director of “The People’s Banking Association,” the injured innocent of as mean a job, as unsavoury a bit of vulturous finance, as had cropped into publicity for many a year—­and finally the last dramatic cry: 

“But it’s noa matter, yo say!  Mester Wharton has nobbut played his party and the workin’ man a dirty trick or two—­an’ yo mun have a gentleman! Noa—­the workin’ man isn’t fit himself to speak wi’ his own enemies i’ th’ gate—­yo mun have a gentleman!—­an’ Mester Wharton, he says he’ll tak’ the post, an’ dea his best for yo—­an’, remember, yo mun have a gentleman!  Soa now—­Yes! or No!—­wull yo?—­or woan’t yo?”

And at that, the precipitation of the great unwieldy form half across the table towards Wharton’s seat—­the roar of the speaker’s immediate supporters thrown up against the dead silence of the rest!

As to his own speech—­he thought of it with a soreness, a disgust which penetrated to bones and marrow.  He had been too desperately taken by surprise—­had lost his nerve—­missed the right tone throughout.  Cool defiance, free self-justification, might have carried him through.  Instead of which—­faugh!

All this was the phantom-show of a few seconds’ thought.  He roused himself from a miserable reaction of mind and body to attend to Marcella’s question.

“Why did I do it?” he repeated; “why—­”

He broke off, pressing both his hands upon his brow.  Then he suddenly sat up and pulled himself together.

“Is that tea?” he said, touching the tray.  “Will you give me some?”