I might have been taken in the same way but for—­for the grace of God, I’m minded to say.  Well, Slingsby’s a good man, and used to be a hard-working man—­all his life, and now it turns out that that prospectus came about by the man de Mersch’s manoeuvres—­“wild-cat schemes,” they call them in the paper that I read.  And there’s any number of them started by de Mersch or his agents.  Just for what?  That de Mersch may be the richest man in the world and a philanthropist.  Well, then, where’s Slingsby, if that’s philanthropy?  So Mr. Churchill comes along and says, in a manner of speaking, “That’s all very well, but this same Mr. Mersch is the grand duke of somewhere or other, and we must bolster him up in his kingdom, or else there will be trouble with the powers.”  Powers—­what’s powers to me?—­or Greenland? when there’s Slingsby, a man I’ve smoked a pipe with every market evening of my life, in the workhouse?  And there’s hundreds of Slingsbys all over the country.’”

“The man was working himself—­Slingsby was a good sort of man.  It shocked even me.  One knows what goes on in one’s own village, of course.  And it’s only too true that there’s hundreds of Slingsbys—­I’m not boring you, am I?”

I did not answer for a moment.  “I—­I had no idea,” I said; “I have been so long out of it and over there one did not realise the ... the feeling.”

“You’ve been well out of it,” she answered; “one has had to suffer, I assure you.”  I believed that she had had to suffer; it must have taken a good deal to make that lady complain.  Her large, ruddy features followed the droop of her eyes down to the fringe of the parasol that she was touching the turf with.  We were sitting on garden seats in the dappled shade of enormous elms.

There was in the air a touch of the sounds discoursed by a yeomanry band at the other end of the grounds.  One could see the red of their uniforms through moving rifts in the crowd of white dresses.

“That wasn’t even the worst,” she said suddenly, lifting her eyes and looking away between the trunks of the trees.  “The man has been reading the papers and he gave me the benefit of his reflections.  ’Someone’s got to be punished for this;’ he said, ’we’ve got to show them that you can’t be hand-and-glove with that sort of blackguard, without paying for it.  I don’t say, mind you, that Mr. Churchill is or ever has been.  I know him, and I trust him.  But there’s more than me in the world, and they can’t all know him.  Well, here’s the papers saying—­or they don’t say it, but they hint, which is worse in a way—­that he must be, or he wouldn’t stick up for the man.  They say the man’s a blackguard out and out—­in Greenland too; has the blacks murdered.  Churchill says the blacks are to be safe-guarded, that’s the word.  Well, they may be—­but so ought Slingsby to have been, yet it didn’t help him.  No, my lady, we’ve got to put our own house in order and that first, before thinking of the powers or places like Greenland.