“In the meantime,” Mr. Crewe continued, “you may drop in to-morrow at three.”

“You’d better make it to-morrow night, hadn’t you?” said Mr. Tooting, significantly.  “There ain’t any back way to this house.”

“As you choose,” said Mr. Crewe.

They passed within a few feet of Victoria, who resisted an almost uncontrollable impulse to rise and confront them.  The words given her to use were surging in her brain, and yet she withheld them why, she knew not.  Perhaps it was because, after such communion as the afternoon had brought, the repulsion she felt for Mr. Tooting aided her to sit where she was.  She heard the outside door open and close, and she saw Humphrey Crewe walk past her again into his library, and that door closed, and she was left in darkness.  Darkness indeed for Victoria, who throughout her life had lived in light alone; in the light she had shed, and the light which she had kindled in others.  With a throb which was an exquisite pain, she understood now the compassion in Austen’s eyes, and she saw so simply and so clearly why he had not told her that her face burned with the shame of her demand.  The one of all others to whom she could go in this trouble was denied her, and his lips were sealed, who would have spoken honestly and without prejudice.  She rose and went quietly out into the biting winter night, and stood staring through the trees at the friendly reddened windows of the little cottage across the way with a yearning that passed her understanding.  Out of those windows, to Victoria, shone honesty and truth, and the peace which these alone may bring.

CHAPTER XIV

THE DESCENDANTS OF HORATIUS

So the twenty honourable members of the State Senate had been dubbed by the man who had a sense of humour and a smattering of the classics, because they had been put there to hold the bridge against the Tarquins who would invade the dominions of the Northeastern.  Twenty picked men, and true they were indeed, but a better name for their body would have been the ‘Life Guard of the Sovereign.’  The five hundred far below them might rage and at times revolt, but the twenty in their shining armour stood undaunted above the vulnerable ground and smiled grimly at the mob.  The citadel was safe.

The real Horatius of the stirring time of which we write was that old and tried veteran, the Honourable Brush Bascom; and Spurius Lartius might be typified by the indomitable warrior, the Honourable Jacob Botcher, while the Honourable Samuel Doby of Hale, Speaker of the House, was unquestionably Herminius.  How the three held the bridge that year will be told in as few and as stirring words as possible.  A greater than Porsena confronted them, and well it was for them, and for the Empire, that the Body Guard of the Twenty stood behind them.

        “Lars Porsena of Clusium,
        By the Nine Gods he swore.”