Saul was not entirely ignorant of what had passed, but had very distorted ideas as to the amount and character of the opposition offered to the bill and the prospects of its speedy success. He listened eagerly to what Eustace told him, and his remarks and questions again struck his master as showing a quickness of insight and a power of appreciation most remarkable in one of his class. He was a more excitable, a more sombre, a more embittered man than he had been a year before. His class hatred had sunk deeper into his soul, and become a more integral part of his nature. Eustace recognised how the humiliation, if not the destruction, of the moneyed classes was to him almost more of an object than the redress of the grievances of the poor. The two were linked together in his mind, it was true; but it was easy to see which of them held the foremost place. Eustace realised, as perhaps he had never done so well before, the temper of the French revolutionaries of forty years back. He could well picture Saul in their midst, and think with a shudder of the deeds he would commit at the head of a furious mob, wrought up to a pitch of ungovernable fury by the rude eloquence of such a leader. Perhaps he realised, too, what might come to England if her sons were stirred up to a like madness, instead of being worked upon by gentler methods. He well knew that there had been moments when his own country had been on the brink of revolution, and that such moments might even come again. Surely it was needful for the men who stood in the forefront of the van of reform to walk warily. They had an immense power behind them; but it was, as Abner had said, the power of an explosive whose properties and whose energies were but imperfectly understood. Reform may be the best hindrance to revolution, but it may also incite the very danger it strives to avert. Eustace had been told this a hundred times before, but he had never been so convinced of the truth of the warning as he was whilst walking on the shore that day in the company of Saul. He suggested taking him away from St. Bride, and showing him the other side of life in the great centres of the world; but Saul, though visibly attracted by the thought of continuing near to Eustace, for whom his love and admiration were most loyal, gave no decided answer. He shrank from the confinement even of freedom in a great city, shrank from even such slight bondage as service under such a master as this would entail. Moreover, there was no need for a speedy decision. Eustace would be some weeks at the castle; he would probably remain there till the result of the election was known. It would be time enough to settle then what should be done. For the present, Saul would remain unfettered and untrammelled.