"So I’m to go away," Evelyn said at last, blankly, drawing a deep breath. "That’s your decision. Well, I suppose you’re right. The real country must be very sweet now. Late the other night, coming back from Weybridge, we stopped by the bridge to hear the nightingales in the woods, just about midnight. I know a tiny cottage where I can go quite by myself and be rural. There’s a farm near which is kept by the kindest, fattest woman I’ve ever seen—just like a very amiable porpoise. She has cows and poultry, and once she let me try to milk a cow. It took me a quarter of an hour even to get the bottom of the pail damp. Suppose I go there later, Jack? There’s a big meeting at the Albert Hall next week, which I’ve absolutely promised to do some work for, and go to." "Take your cottage, by all means, but please have mercy on the cows," said Cummings. "You’ll get off as soon as you can, won’t you?" They stood for a moment looking at each other—friends whose paths might probably never cross again. Then Evelyn went out with bent head. Cummings watched her go. When she was out of sight he made the sign of the cross and sat down wearily in his chair. *CHAPTER IX* "A woman wishes and believes; a man wills and achieves. The wish of the woman ripens into a faith; the will of the man hardens into a fact."—J. S. BLACKIE. From floor to ceiling the Albert Hall, which normally contains ten thousand people, was packed to overflowing. Tickets for the great Tariff Reform Demonstration had been begged, borrowed and bargained for; it was said that a newly made peer had given a hundred guineas for a box. Orderly files of subdued men and women—the prevailing characteristics of an English crowd are melancholy and dejection—stretched spirally like a huge serpent, outside each separate door, awaiting the remote chance of returned seats. Hawkers had pursued them to the edge of the barrier, chaffing them and harassing them with a motley row of wares—gaudy painted flags and ribbon badges, highly coloured and totally unreliable programmes of the evening’s performance, printed on coarse handkerchiefs, Japanese fans and cheap scent, photographs of the leading members of the League, postcard views of their homes and pets, sticks of chocolate, strips of gay-coloured tissue papers tied together with string and known to the initiated as "ticklers." It was a typical crowd except for its magnitude: street loafer, cab-runner, British workman, bank clerk and wide-eyed child who never stopped eating oranges, the suburban man of business with his family, the socialist reformer whose personal habits made his immediate neighbourhood unwholesome, the cynic who complained aloud of his own special wrongs and the evils of the Empire, the people’s orator who swelled with importance and big words, and spoke with patronage of the King—all were there.