“We-ell, we can’t work under cover much longer. Besides, I doubt if there’s much of any fight left in Embree and his crowd.” He peered out through the peep-hole. “They’ve turned it into an experience meeting now,” he remarked. “Then you come on. They’re expecting you. Will you come peaceably or be escorted?” “Let me keep out of sight until it’s my turn, anyway,” pleaded Jeremy. So the lawyer, leading him in, established him behind a wing where he was half-hidden, and placed himself as a screen. As he settled himself down, a plump and luxuriously dressed woman at the rear of the hall rose and said austerely: “I disapprove The Guardian’s local policy. I consider it unfair and prejudiced against--er--ah--against our kind of people. But while we are at war I agree to support it loyally and to deal only with those who support it.” “Are my eyes playing tricks?” whispered Jeremy in Dana’s ear. “Or is that Mrs. Ambrose Galsworth, who tried to have me blackballed at the Canoe Club?” “She’s a new member. Wait! There’s worse to come,” chuckled the lawyer. A little, lean, brisk, twinkling old maid projected herself out of her seat with a jumping-jack effect. “I never expected to live to see the day I’d speak for The Guardian after they printed that awful political attack on my dear uncle,” she declared. “But the country first! Put down Celia Jenney on your list. And”--her black bright eyes snapped out sparks--“if there’s a store in town that don’t want my trade while this war is on, all it has to do is to take its advertising out of The Guardian and put it into The Fair Dealer--if that’s its silly name.” “She spends only about fifteen thousand a year in this town,” observed Dana aside to Jeremy. “No wonder the advertisers have been falling over themselves to get back into the paper!” murmured the editor. After further informal pledges the chairman called for reports from the “Missionary Workers.” Up rose Aider-man Crobin--Crooked Crobin, as The Guardian had dubbed him for years. “T’ree of my constitchoonts assured me this mahmin’--voluntarily, ye ondherstand; quite voluntarily--that they are cancelin’ their contract wid th’ noo paper.” A tall, pale young woman rose in the center of the house, and as she moistened her nervous lips a murmur and a rustle swept over the audience; for this was Mrs. Dennis Robbins, Governor Embree’s sister. “I bring five pledges of advertisers to stand by The Guardian--and America,” she said in a low voice; and a quick ripple of sympathetic applause answered her. Before it had died away, old Madam Taylor rustled silkily to her feet. “I’m the tax-dodger,” she cackled. “See The Guardian if you don’t believe it. But I never dodged a good fight. Two stores that I trade with cut down their advertising in The Guardian. So I cut down my trade with them. I cut it down to nothing. Now I understand they feel differently about the paper,” she concluded malevolently.