“Could you have cured him?”

“Of course not.”

“Could you have done him any good?”

“I ought to have been told.”

“You had enough of worries before you for one day, sonny.”

“That was my business,” said Paul.

“Jane and I, being as it were responsible parties, took the liberty, so to speak, of thinking it our business too.”

Paul drummed impatiently on his knees.

“Yer ain’t angry, are you, sonny?” the old man asked plaintively.

“No—­not angry—­with you and Jane—­certainly not.  I know you acted for the best, out of love for me.  But you shouldn’t have deceived me.  I thought it was a mere nervous breakdown—­the strain and shock.  You never said a word about it, and Jane, when I talked to her this morning, never gave me to dream there was anything serious amiss.  So I say you two have deceived me.”

“But I’m a telling of yer, sonny—­”

“Yes, yes, I know.  I don’t reproach you.  But don’t you see?  I’m sick of lies.  Dead sick.  I’ve been up to my neck in a bog of falsehood ever since I was a child and I’m making a hell of a struggle to get on to solid ground.  The Truth for me now.  By God! nothing but the Truth!”

Barney Bill, sitting for-ward, hunched up, on the seat of the car, just as he used to sit on the footboard of his van, twisted his head round.  “I’m not an eddicated person,” said he, “although if I hadn’t done a bit of reading in my time I’d have gone dotty all by my lones in the old ’bus, but I’ve come to one or two conclusions in my, so to speak, variegated career, and one is that if you go one in that ’ere mad way for Truth in Parliament, you’ll be a bull in a china shop, and they’ll get sticks and dawgs to hustle you out.  Sir Robert Peel, old Gladstone, Dizzy, the whole lot of the old Yuns was up against it.  They had to compromise.  It’s compromise”—­the old man dwelt lovingly, as usual, on the literary word—­“it’s compromise you must have in Parliament.”

“I’ll see Parliament damned first!” cried Paul, his nerves on edge.

“You’ll have to wait a long time, sonny,” said Barney Bill, wagging a sage head.  “Parliament takes a lot of damning.”

“Anyhow,” said Paul, not eager to continue the argument, but unconsciously caught in the drift of Barney Bill’s philosophy, “my private life isn’t politics, and there’s not going to be another lie in my private life as long as I live.”

The old man broke a short silence with a dry chuckle.  “How it takes one back!” he said reflectively.  “Lor lumme!  I can hear yer speaking now—­just in the same tone—­the night what yer run away with me.  Yer hadn’t a seat to yer breeches then, and now you’ve a seat in Parliament.”  He chuckled again at his joke.  “But”—­he gripped the young man’s knee in his bony clasp—­“you’re just the same Paul, sonny, God bless yer—­and you’ll come out straight all right.  Here we are.”