He had organized volunteer cycle companies of speakers from the towns, young working-men and women and students, to go out on summer evenings and hold meetings on the village greens.  They were winning their way.  But it was slow work.  And Carleton was countering their efforts by a hired opposition that followed them from place to place, and whose interruptions were made use of to represent the whole campaign as a fiasco.

“He’s clever,” laughed Phillips.  “I’d enjoy the fight, if I’d only myself to think of, and life wasn’t so short.”

The laugh died away and a shadow fell upon his face.

“If I could get a few of the big landlords to come in on my side,” he continued, “it would make all the difference in the world.  They’re sensible men, some of them; and the whole thing could be carried out without injury to any legitimate interest.  I could make them see that, if I could only get them quietly into a corner.”

“But they’re frightened of me,” he added, with a shrug of his broad shoulders, “and I don’t seem to know how to tackle them.”

Those drawing-rooms?  Might not something of the sort be possible?  Not, perhaps, the sumptuous salon of her imagination, thronged with the fair and famous, suitably attired.  Something, perhaps, more homely, more immediately attainable.  Some of the women dressed, perhaps, a little dowdily; not all of them young and beautiful.  The men wise, perhaps, rather than persistently witty; a few of them prosy, maybe a trifle ponderous; but solid and influential.  Mrs. Denton’s great empty house in Gower Street?  A central situation and near to the tube.  Lords and ladies had once ruffled there; trod a measure on its spacious floors; filled its echoing stone hall with their greetings and their partings.  The gaping sconces, where their link-boys had extinguished their torches, still capped its grim iron railings.

Seated in the great, sombre library, Joan hazarded the suggestion.  Mrs. Denton might almost have been waiting for it.  It would be quite easy.  A little opening of long fastened windows; a lighting of chill grates; a little mending of moth-eaten curtains, a sweeping away of long-gathered dust and cobwebs.

Mrs. Denton knew just the right people.  They might be induced to bring their sons and daughters—­it might be their grandchildren, youth being there to welcome them.  For Joan, of course, would play her part.

The lonely woman touched her lightly on the hand.  There shot a pleading look from the old stern eyes.

“You will have to imagine yourself my daughter,” she said.  “You are taller, but the colouring was the same.  You won’t mind, will you?”