“You won’t see me again to-day unless you send up for me,” her mistress announced.  “Let me have the letters to sign before five.  Try and get away early, if you can.  The car is going in to Lynton.  Perhaps you would like the ride?”

“I should enjoy it very much, your ladyship,” the girl replied gratefully.  “There is really very little to do this afternoon.”

“You can bring the letters whenever you like, then,” Lady Jane told her, “and let Martin know that you are going in with him.”

“You study your people, I see,” Tallente remarked, as they strolled together back to the house.

“I try,” she assented.  “I try to do what I can in my little community here, very much as you, in a far greater way, try to study the people in your political programme.  Of course,” she went on, “it is far easier for me.  The one thing I try to develop amongst them is a genuine, not a false spirit of independence.  I want them to lean upon no one.  I have no charities in connection with the estate, no soup kitchens or coal at Christmas, or anything of that sort.  My theory is that every person is the better for being able to look after himself, and my idea of charity is placing him in a position to be able to do it.  I don’t want to be their Lady of the Manor and accept their rents and give them a dinner.  I try to encourage them to save money and to buy their own farms.  The man here who owns his own farm and makes it pay is in a position to lead a thoroughly self-respecting and honourable life.  He ought to get what there is to be got out of life, and his children should be yeomen citizens of the best possible type.  Of course, all this sort of thing is so much easier in the country.  Very often, in the winter nights here, I waste my time trying to think out your greater problems.”

“Problems,” he observed, “which the good people of Hellesfield have just decided that I am not the man to solve.”

“An election counts for nothing,” she declared.  “The merest whim will lead thousands of voters into the wrong polling booth.  Besides, nearly all the papers admit that your defeat was owing to a political intrigue.  The very men who should have supported you—­who had promised to support you, in fact—­went against you at the last moment.  That was entirely due to Miller, wasn’t it?”

“Miller has been my political bete noir for years,” he confessed.  “To me he represents the ignominious pacifist, whereas to him I represent the sabre-rattling jingo.  I got the best of it while the war was on.  To-day it seems to me that he has an undue share of influence in the country.”

“Who are the men who really represent what you and I would understand as Labour?” she asked.

“That is too difficult a question to answer offhand,” he replied.  “Personally, I have come to the conclusion that Labour is unrepresentable—­Labour as a cause.  There are too many of the people yet who haven’t vision.”