“It wouldn’t, really.”

“Well, you seem to have thought about a lot of things.  Did you ever once think about me, Dorothy?”

“Yes, I did.  Have you ever read the Psalms?  There’s a jolly one that begins:  ’Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war and my fingers to fight.’  I used to think of you when I read that.  I thought of you a lot.

“That’s what I was coming to.  It was the queerest thing of all.  Everything seemed ended when I went to prison.  I knew you wouldn’t care for me after what I’d done—­you must really listen to this, Frank—­I knew you couldn’t and wouldn’t marry me; and it somehow didn’t matter.  What I’d got hold of was bigger than that.  I knew that all this Women’s Suffrage business was only a part of it, a small, ridiculous part.

“I sort of saw the redeemed of the Lord.  They were men, as well as women, Frank.  And they were all free.  They were all free because they were redeemed.  And the funny thing was that you were part of it.  You were mixed up in the whole queer, tremendous business.  Everything was ended.  And everything was begun; so that I knew you understood even when you didn’t understand.  It was really as if I’d got you tight, somehow; and I knew you couldn’t go, even when you’d gone.”

“And yet you don’t see that it’s a crime to force me to go.”

“I see that it would be a worse crime to force you to stay if you mean going.

“What time is it?”

“A quarter to eight.”

“And I’ve got to go home and have a bath.  Whatever you do, don’t make me late for that infernal banquet.  You are going to drive me there?”

“I’m going to drive you there, but I’m not going in with you.”

“Poor darling!  Did I ask you to go in?”

He drove her back to her father’s house.  She came out of it burnished and beautiful, dressed in clean white linen, with the broad red, white and blue tricolour of the Women’s Franchise Union slanting across her breast.

He drove her to the Banquet of the Prisoners, to the Imperial Hotel, Kingsway.  They went in silence; for their hearts ached too much for speaking.  But in Dorothy’s heart, above the aching, there was that queer exaltation that had sustained her in prison.

He left her at the entrance of the hotel, where Michael and Nicholas waited to receive her.

Michael and Nicholas went in with her to the Banquet.  They hated it, but they went in.

Veronica was with them.  She too wore a white frock, with red, white and blue ribbons.

“Drayton’s a bit of a rotter,” Michael said, “not to see you through.”

“How can he when he feels like that about it?”

“As if we didn’t feel!”

* * * * *

Three hundred and thirty women and twenty men waited in the Banquet Hall to receive the prisoners.