The young man laughed a little nervously.

“You’re not over-cordial!”

Maraton shrugged his shoulders.

“The world in which you live,” he remarked, “is a training school, I suppose, for false sentiment.  The slight kinship that there is between us is of no account to me.  I simply remind you once more that it is to your advantage to neither know me or to know of me.  Remember that, and it may be London or Paris or New York—­wherever you choose.”

The young man remounted his coach, and Maraton passed on.  He walked without a pause to the square in which his house was situated.  Here he found Aaron hard at work and, sitting down at once, he began to sign his letters.

“No end of people have been here,” Aaron announced.  “I have got rid of them all.”

“Good!” Maraton said shortly.  “By-the-bye, Aaron, isn’t there a meeting to-night at the Clarion?”

Aaron nodded.

“David Ross is going to speak.  He can move them when he starts.  My sister is going to call here for me, and I thought if you didn’t want me, I’d like to go.”

“We will all go together,” Maraton decided.  “We can creep in somewhere at the back, I suppose.  I want to hear how they do it.”

The young man’s face lit up with joy.

“There’s sure to be lots of people there,” he declared, “but we can find a seat at the back quite easily.”

“What’s it all about?” Maraton asked.

“The proposed boiler-maker’s strike,” Aaron replied eagerly.  “The meeting is really a meeting of the workpeople at Boulding’s.  But are you sure you won’t go on the platform, sir?”

Maraton shook his head.

“That is just what I don’t want to do.  I want to see what these meetings are like, what sort of arguments are used, what the spirit of the people is, if I can.  That is what I would really like to find out, Aaron—­the spirit of the people.”

The young man looked up from his work.  He was greatly changed during the last few hours.  He was wearing a new suit of clothes and clean linen; his hair had been cut, his face shaved.  Yet in some respects he was unaltered.  His eyes still burned in their sockets, his lips still quivered.

“I will tell you what the people are like,” he said.  “They are like dumb animals, like sheep.  They have suffered so long and so much that their nerve power is numbed.  They lack will, they lack initiative.  They are narrowed down to a daily life which makes of them something little different from an animal.  Yet they can be roused.  David Ross himself has done it, done it like none of those other M.P.’s.  I have seen him carried out of himself.  He is like some of these Welshmen and Salvation Army people when they’re half drunk with religion—­the words seem to come to them in a stream.  That’s how David Ross is sometimes.  But it isn’t often any one can get at them.”

“That is what they say over on the other side,” he remarked softly.