“There, you laugh,” said Lady Winterbourne, vehemently:  “the men do.  But I tell you it is no laughing matter to feel that your heart and conscience have gone over to the enemy.  You want to feel with your class, and you can’t.  Think of what used to happen in the old days.  My grandmother, who was as good and kind a woman as ever lived, was driving home through our village one evening, and a man passed her, a labourer who was a little drunk, and who did not take off his hat to her.  She stopped, made her men get down and had him put in the stocks there and then—­the old stocks were still standing on the village green.  Then she drove home to her dinner, and said her prayers no doubt that night with more consciousness than usual of having done her duty.  But if the power of the stocks still remained to us, my dear friend”—­and she laid her thin old woman’s hand, flashing with diamonds, on Lord Maxwell’s arm—­“we could no longer do it, you or I. We have lost the sense of right in our place and position—­at least I find I have.  In the old days if there was social disturbance the upper class could put it down with a strong hand.”

“So they would still,” said Lord Maxwell, drily, “if there were violence.  Once let it come to any real attack on property, and you will see where all these Socialist theories will be.  And of course it will not be we—­not the landowners or the capitalists—­who will put it down.  It will be the hundreds and thousands of people with something to lose—­a few pounds in a joint-stock mill, a house of their own built through a co-operative store, an acre or two of land stocked by their own savings—­it is they, I am afraid, who will put Miss Boyce’s friends down so far as they represent any real attack on property—­and brutally, too, I fear, if need be.”

“I dare say,” exclaimed Marcella, her colour rising again.  “I never can see how we Socialists are to succeed.  But how can any one rejoice in it?  How can any one wish that the present state of things should go on?  Oh! the horrors one sees in London.  And down here, the cottages, and the starvation wages, and the ridiculous worship of game, and then, of course, the poaching—­”

Miss Raeburn pushed back her chair with a sharp noise.  But her brother was still peeling his pear, and no one else moved.  Why did he let such talk go on?  It was too unseemly.

Lord Maxwell only laughed.  “My dear young lady,” he said, much amused, “are you even in the frame of mind to make a hero of a poacher?  Disillusion lies that way!—­it does indeed.  Why—­Aldous!—­I have been hearing such tales from Westall this morning.  I stopped at Corbett’s farm a minute or two on the way home, and met Westall at the gate coming out.  He says he and his men are being harried to death round about Tudley End by a gang of men that come, he thinks, from Oxford, a driving gang with a gig, who come at night or in the early morning—­the smartest rascals out, impossible to catch.  But he says he thinks he will soon have his hand on the local accomplice—­a Mellor man—­a man named Hurd:  not one of our labourers, I think.”