“If Milligan is too strong for your proud, aristocratic stomach,” he whispered, “you can cut and run without attracting attention.”

Milligan had evidently just began his discourse.  I had not listened to him for five minutes when I found myself caught in the grip which he was famous for fastening on his audience.  With his subject—­Nationalisation of the Land—­and his arguments I had been perfectly familiar for years.  As a boy I had read Henry George’s “Progress and Poverty” with the superciliousness of the young believer in the divine right of Britain’s landed gentry, and before the Eton Debating Society I had demolished the whole theory to my own and every one else’s satisfaction.  Later, as a practical politician, I had kept myself abreast of the Socialist movement.  I did not need Mr. John Milligan, whom my lingering flippancy had called a son of thunder, to teach me the elements of the matter.  But at this peculiar crisis of my life I felt that, in a queer, unknown way, Milligan had a message for me.  It was uncanny.  I sat and listened to the exposition of Utopia with the rapt intensity of any cheesemonger’s assistant there before whose captured spirit floated the vision of days to come when the land should so flow with milk and money that golden cheeses would be like buttercups for the plucking.  It was not the man’s gospel that fascinated me nor his illuminated prophecy of the millennium that produced the vibrations in my soul, but the surging passion of his faith, the tempest of his enthusiasm.  I had enough experience of public speaking to distinguish between the theatrical and the genuine in oratory.  Here was no tub-thumping soothsayer, but an inspired zealot.  He lived his impassioned creed in every fibre of his frame and faculties.  He was Titanic, this rough miner, in his unconquerable hope, divine in his yearning love of humanity.

When he ended there was a dead silence for a second, and then a roar of applause from the pale, earnest, city-stamped faces.  A lump rose in my throat.  Campion clutched my knee.  A light burned in his eyes.

“Well?  What about Boanerges?”

“Only one thing,” said I, “I wish I were as alive as that man.”

A negligible person proposed a vote of thanks to Milligan, after which the hall began to empty.  Campion, caught by a group of his proletariat friends, signalled to me to wait for him.  And as I waited I saw Eleanor Faversham come slowly from the platform down the central gangway.  Her eyes fixed themselves on me at once—­for standing there alone I must have been a conspicuous figure, an intruder from the gorgeous West—­and with a little start of pleasure she hurried her pace.  I made my way past the chattering loiterers in my row, and met her.  We shook hands.

“Well?  Saul among the prophets?  Who would have thought of seeing you here!”

I waved my hand towards Campion.  “We have the same sponsor.”  She glanced at him for a swift instant and then at me.