They rose from their chairs, and made their way towards the Albert Gate. Patricia was unusually vivacious, and giving a truce to serious subjects, chatted in lighter vein. When they reached the main road, however, they were abruptly silenced. The smile faded from the young Member’s face, and the girl looked on with equal gravity. The traffic was being stopped by a procession—a procession characterised by sordidness, for those who took part constituted the great body of the unemployed in the metropolis. Four abreast they walked, dirty, unkempt men, with ragged clothes and emaciated faces. They had turned out in hundreds, organised presumably by a trade-union, in order to enlist the sympathy of a good-natured public. Here and there banners were displayed, bearing the legend:—“_Unemployed and starving_”; “_British workmen thrown out by aliens_”; “_Employ British labour_”; “_Boycott alien labour_”; “_Boycott foreign Jews_,” and other numerous inscriptions. Along the route, which was guarded by the police, men were collecting money from the passers-by. It was indeed a sight to move the most phlegmatic. Patricia almost involuntarily tightened her grasp on her lover’s arm. A more depraved-looking set of human beings she had never seen. Some, it is true, were stalwart Britons, or had been before the starvation process had set in; but the majority of them were unable to hold themselves erect from sheer weakness, and the dogged expression of misery was on all faces alike. The expression haunted the girl for weeks; it suggested to her naught else but the faces of lost spirits in Hades. She turned away with a shudder. “Terrible!” she exclaimed unsteadily. “It makes me feel quite ill.” “Do not look, dear,” Montella advised, with solicitude. “Such sights are not for you.” “Oh, but I must look.” She turned back again. “One cannot shirk such a grim reality. I knew that while we were living in luxury there existed thousands who had not the bare necessities of life, but I have never had the fact pressed home so forcibly before. I feel as if I had no right to wear these expensive sables—which I could so easily do without—when these poor creatures have nothing to eat. The look in their eyes condemns me. Cannot we do something to help them, Lionel? Surely there must be something terribly wrong somewhere, or else we should never see such a degrading sight as this.” She unfastened the magnificent diamond brooch she wore beneath her jacket, and impulsively cast it into the collecting-box; her tiny gold purse with its contents followed suit. Her lover, even if he thought her proceeding rash, did not remonstrate; he too divested himself of all the gold in his possession. “The condition of these people is not exactly the fault of the Government,” he replied thoughtfully, as they moved on towards Knightsbridge. “It is always disastrous to trade when the supply exceeds the demand. It makes labour so cheap that the men cannot ask more than a starvation wage.”