“Oh, come!” he remonstrated.  “No need to be so stand-offish.”

He tried to hold her hand, an attempt which she skilfully frustrated.

“Really,” she insisted earnestly, “this sort of thing does not amuse me.  I avoid it even amongst my own friends.”

“Am I not a friend?” he demanded.

“So far as regards our work, you certainly are,” she admitted.  “Outside it, I do not think that we could ever have much to say to one another.”

“Why not?” he objected, a little sharply.  “We’re as close together in our work and aims as any two people could be.  Perhaps,” he went on, after a moment’s hesitation and a careful glance around, “I ought to take you into my confidence as regards my personal position.”

“I am not inviting anything of the sort,” she observed, with faint but wasted sarcasm.

“You know me, of course,” he went on, “only as the late manager of a firm of timber merchants and the present elected representative of the allied Timber and Shipbuilding Trades Unions.  What you do not know”—­a queer note of triumph stealing into his tone “is that I am a wealthy man.”

She raised her eyebrows.

“I imagined,” she remarked, “that all Labour leaders were like the Apostles—­took no thought for such things.”

“One must always keep one’s eye on the main chance; Miss Abbeway,” he protested, “or how would things be when one came to think of marriage, for instance?”

“Where did your money come from?” she asked bluntly.

Her question was framed simply to direct him from a repulsive subject.  His embarrassment, however, afforded her food for future thought.

“I have saved money all my life,” he confided eagerly.  “An uncle left me a little.  Lately I have speculated—­successfully.  I don’t want to dwell on this.  I only wanted you to understand that if I chose I could cut a very different figure—­that my wife wouldn’t have to live in a suburb.”

“I really do not see,” was the cold response, “how this concerns me in the least.”

“You, call yourself a Socialist, don’t you, Miss Abbeway?” he demanded.  “You’re not allowing the fact that you’re an aristocrat and that I am a self-made man to weigh with you?”

“The accident of birth counts for nothing,” she replied, “you must know that those are my principles—­but it sometimes happens that birth and environment give one tastes which it is impossible to ignore.  Please do not let us pursue this conversation any further, Mr. Fenn.  We have had a very pleasant dinner, for which I thank you—­and here we are at Mr. Orden’s flat.”

Her companion handed her out a little sulkily, and they ascended in the lift to the fifth floor.  The door was opened to them by Julian’s servant.  He recognised Catherine and greeted her respectfully.  Fenn produced his authority, which the man accepted without comment.

“No news of your master yet?” Catherine asked him.