In this way—­Mr Benny scribbling, erasing, purring over a phrase and anon declaiming it—­Cai venturing a question here and there, but always apologetically, with a sense of being carried off his feet and swept into deep waters—­in half an hour the letter was composed.  It was not at all the letter Cai had expected.  It threw up his suit into a high romantic light in which he scarcely recognised it or himself.  But he felt it to be extremely effective.  His conscience pricked him a little, as in imagination he saw ’Bias with head aslant and elbows sprawling, inking himself to the wrists in literary effort.  Poor ’Bias!  But “all’s fair in love and war.”

To his mild astonishment Mr Benny declined a fee.  “If, sir, you will be good enough to accept it, as between friends?” the little man suggested timidly.  “You have helped me to pass a very pleasant morning:  and it will be—­shall I say?—­something of a bond between us if, in the event, our joint composition should prove to have been instrumental in forwarding—­er—­Captain Hunken’s suit.”

Cai hesitated.  At that moment he would have preferred conferring a benefit to receiving one.  His conscience wanted a small salve.  Yet to refuse would hurt Mr Benny’s feelings.

“I’ll tell you what!” he suggested:  “We’ll throw it in with another favour I meant to ask of you, and for which you shall name your terms.  It has been suggested—­by several, so there’s no need to mention names—­ that I ought to go in for public life, in a small way, of course.”

“Indeed, Captain Hocken?” Mr Benny smiled to himself; he began to understand, or thought that he did.  “A very laudable ambition, too!”

“The mischief is,” confessed Cai, “that I have had no practice in speakin’.  I couldn’t, as they say, make a public speech for nuts.”

“It is an art, Captain Hocken,” said Mr Benny reassuringly, “and can be acquired.  An ambition to acquire it sir,—­though in your mind you viewed it but as a means to an end,—­would in my humble view be an ambition even more laudable than that of shining on the administrative side of public life.  For it is not only an art, sir, and a great one.  It is well-nigh a lost art.  Where, nowadays, are your Burkes, your Foxes, your Sheridans—­not to mention your Demostheneses?”

“You’ll understand,” hesitated Cai, “that nothing beyond the School Board is in question at present.  I mention this strictly between ourselves.”

Mr Benny swung about upon his stool.  “Listen to this, Captain Hocken—­ ’Observe, sir, that, besides the desire which all men have naturally of supporting the honour of their own government, that sense of dignity and that security to property which ever attends freedom, has’—­or, as I should prefer to say, have—­’a tendency to increase the stock of the free community.  Much may be taken where most is accumulated.  And what is the soil or climate where experience has not uniformly proved that the voluntary flow of heaped-up plenty, bursting from the weight of heaped-up luxuriance, has ever run with a more copious stream of revenue, than could be squeezed from the dry husks of oppressed indigence by the straining of all the machinery in the world?’ That is Burke, sir—­Burke:  who, by the fribbles of his own day, was lightly termed the dinner-bell of the House of Commons, yet compelled the attention of all serious political thinkers—­”