“Ah, but your very presence alters everything!” she cried.  “It makes everything possible—­everything.  My brother, too, is mad with excitement.  He hoped that you might have been at the Clarion Hall to-night, before you went to Downing Street.  You have seen Mr. Foley and talked with him?”

“I have come straight from there,” he told her.  “Foley is a shrewd man.  He sees the writing upon the wall.  He is afraid.”

She looked at him and laughed.

“They will try to buy you,” she remarked scornfully.  “They will try to deal with you as they did with Blake and others like him—­you—­Maraton!  Oh, I wonder if England knows what it means, your coming!—­if she really feels the breaking dawn!”

“Tell me about yourself?” Maraton asked, a little abruptly—­“your work?  I know you only by name, remember—­your articles in the reviews and your evidence before the Woman Labour Commission.

“I am a tailoress,” she replied.  “It is horrible work, but I have the good fortune to be quick.  I can make a living—­there are many who cannot.”

He was leaning back in his chair, his head supported by his hand, his eyes fixed curiously upon her.  Her pallor was not wholly the pallor of ill-health.  In her beautiful eyes shone the fire of life.  She laughed at him softly and held out her hands for his inspection.  They were shapely enough, but her finger-tips were scotched and pricked.

“Here are the hall-marks of my trade.  Others who work by my side have fallen away.  It is of their sufferings I have written.  I myself am physically very strong.  It is the average person who counts.”

He looked at her thoughtfully.

“You have written and worked a great deal for your age.  Are you still in employment?”

“Of course!  I left off at seven this evening.  I have nothing else in my life,” she added simply, “but my work, our work, the breaking of these vile bonds.  I need no pleasures.  I have never thought of any.”

Her eyes suddenly dropped before his.  A confusion of thought seemed to have seized upon her.  Maraton, too, conscious of the nature of his imaginings, although innocent of any personal application, was not wholly free from embarrassment.

“Perhaps you will think,” he observed, “that I am asking too many personal questions for a new acquaintance, but, after all, I must know you, must I not?  We are fellow workers in a great cause.  The small things do not matter.”

She looked at him once more frankly.  The blush had passed from her cheeks, her eyes were untroubled.

“I don’t know what came over me,” she confessed.  “I was suddenly afraid that you might misunderstand my coming to you like this, without invitation, so late.  Somehow, with you, it didn’t seem to count.”

“It must not!”

More at her ease now she glanced around the room and back at him.  He smiled.

“Confess,” he said, “that there are some things about me and my surroundings which have surprised you?”