“I’m anything,” Maraton answered, “that will do away with such profits as you’ve been speaking of.  I am anything which will bring a fair share of the profits of his labour to the operative who now gets none.  I hate capital.  It’s a false quantity, a false value.  It’s got to come back to the people.  It belongs to them.”

“You’re right, man,” Henneford declared grimly.  “How are you going to get it back, eh?  Show us.  We are powerful up here.  We could paralyse trade from the Clyde to the Thames, if we thought it would do any good.  What’s your text to-night, Mr. Maraton?”

“I haven’t thought,” Maraton replied.  “I have plenty to say to the people though.”

“You gave ’em what for in Chicago,” Preston remarked, with a grin.

“I haven’t been used to mince words,” Maraton admitted.

“There’s four thousand policemen told off to look after you,” Henneford informed him.  “By-the-bye, is it true that Dale and all of them are coming up to-night?”

Maraton nodded.

“I wired for some of them,” he assented.  “So long as I am going to make a definite pronouncement, they may as well hear it.”

“Been spending the week-end with Foley, haven’t you?” Preston enquired, closing his eyes a little.

Maraton nodded.  “Yes,” he confessed, “I have been there.”

“There are many that don’t think much of Foley,” Henneford remarked.  “Myself I am not sure what to make of him.  I think he’d be a people’s man, right enough, if it wasn’t for the Cabinet.”

“I believe, in my heart,” Maraton said, “that he is a people’s man.”

They sped on through deserted spaces, past smoke-stained factories, across cobbled streets, past a wilderness of small houses, grimy, everywhere repellent.  Soon they entered Manchester by the back way and pulled up presently at a small and unimposing hotel.

“We’ve taken a room for you here,” Henneford announced.  “It’s close to the hall, and it’s quiet and clean enough.  The big hotels I doubt whether you’d ever be able to get out of, when once they found where you were.”

“As a matter of fact,” Preston added, “there’s a room taken in your name at the Midland, to put folks off a bit.  We’ll have to smuggle you out here if there’s any trouble to-night.  The people are rare and restless.”

“It will do very nicely, I am sure,” Maraton replied.

The place was an ordinary commercial hotel, clean apparently but otherwise wholly unattractive.  Henneford led the way up-stairs and with some pride threw open the door of a room on the first floor.  “We’ve got you a sitting-room,” he said.  “Thought you might want to talk to these Press people, perhaps, or do a bit of work.  Your secretary’s somewhere about the place—­turned up with a typewriter early this morning.  And there’s a young woman—­”

“A what?” Maraton asked.

“A young woman,” Henneford continued,—­“secretary’s sister or something.”