“A Liberal is much more fashionable than he was,” Brooks assured her, cheerfully.

“Fashionable!  I know the son of a Marquis, a Lord himself, who’s a Liberal, and a good one,” Mr. Bullsom remarked, with a wink to Brooks.

“Well, my dears,” Mrs. Bullsom said, making an effort to rise, and failing at the first attempt, “shall we leave the gentlemen to talk about it over their wine?

“Oh, you sit down again, mother,” Selina directed.

“That sort of thing’s quite old-fashioned, isn’t it, Mr. Brooks?  We’re going to stay with you.  You can smoke.  Ann, bring the cigars.”

Mrs. Bullsom, who was looking forward to a nap in a quiet corner of the drawing-room, obeyed with resignation written large on her good-natured, somewhat flushed face.  But Mr. Bullsom, who wanted to revert to the subject which still fascinated him, grunted.

“Hang these new ideas,” he said.  “It’s you they’re after, Mr. Brooks.  As a rule, they’re off before I can get near my cigar-box.”

Selina affected a little consciousness, which she felt became her.

“Such foolishness, papa.  You don’t believe it, do you, Mr. Brooks?”

“Am I not to, then?” he asked, looking down upon her with a smile.  Whereupon Selina’s consciousness became confusion.

“How stupid you are,” she murmured.  “You can believe just what you like.  What are you looking at over in the corner of the room?”

“Ghosts,” he answered.

Yet very much as those images flitted at that moment through his brain, so events were really shaping themselves in that bare clean-swept room into which his eyes had for a moment strayed away.  Mary Scott was there, her long apron damp with soap-suds and her cheeks red with exertion, for she had just come from bathing twelve youngsters, who, not being used to the ordeal, had given trouble.  There were other of his helpers too, a dozen of them up to their eyes in work, and a long string of applicants patiently waiting their turn.  The right sort too—­the sort from underneath—­pale-faced, hollow-eyed, weary, yet for a moment stirred from their lethargy of suffering at the prospect of some passing relief.  There was a young woman, hollow-cheeked, thin herself as a lath, eager for work or chance of work for her husband—­that morning out of hospital, still too delicate to face the night air and the hot room.  He knew shorthand, could keep books, typewrite, a little slip about his character, but that was all over and done with.  A bank clerk with L90 a year, obliged to wear a silk hat, who marries a penniless girl on his summer holiday.  They must live, both of them, and the gold passed through his fingers day by day, an endless shower.  The magistrates had declined to sentence him, but the shame—­and he was never strong.  Brooks saw the card made out for that little cottage at Hastings, and enclosed with the railway ticket Owston was picking up fast there—­and smiled faintly.  He saw the girl on her breathless way home with the good news, saw her wet face heaven turned for the first time for many a month.  There were men and women in the world with hearts then.  They were not all puppets of wood and stone, even as those bank directors.  Then, too, she would believe again that there might be a God.