“Very well,” answers the duke coldly. “As you are determined, so be it, Chertsey.” Lord Pandulph rises. He accepts his _congé_ willingly. It has been gall and wormwood to work with such colleagues as these. He is out of place, and he feels it. He knows that he ought to be where the duke is sitting. Undoubtedly he ought. “Then it is understood? I shall tender my resignation without any delay, so that you will be able to nominate my successor. This being so, it is better I should retire at once. Good-morning, Devonsmere.” And without deigning recognition of the eleven satellites, Lord Pandulph leaves the room. “Really, Chertsey is about the most insufferable fellow to deal with I have ever known,” murmurs Lord Hankney, the Minister for Agriculture, adjusting his eyeglass. “We shall do much better without him, Devonsmere.” So they sit on in council these strange twelve, a Ministry misrepresentative of the people. The policy against which Lord Pandulph warned them, they agree to adopt. The military is to be ordered out, a direct incentive to civil war, while the warrants for the arrest of Gloria de Lara and Lady Flora Desmond are to remain in force. It is the old story, merely history repeating itself, of a group of men omitting to consult the people—whose paid servants they are—before acting. Office, unfortunately, nowadays is too much considered as the happy hunting ground of a clique or class, to the exclusion of the people’s acknowledged representatives. So the wrong men step in, and take upon themselves responsibilities for which they are totally disqualified and unfitted; and thus are mistakes committed for which those who pay the taxes have to suffer. The case in point is a good one. Such a decision would never have been come to had the Duke of Devonsmere’s Cabinet contained some of the people’s representatives. [Illustration] CHAPTER VIII. “What news, Evie?” The speaker has risen from a low wooden stool just outside the verandahed porch of a pretty, straggling, rambling cottage, hidden amidst many and various creepers, whose parasitical arms interlace with each other in bewildering confusion. All around stretch dark pine woods far as the eye can reach, as it scans their broad expanse through the cuttings in the forest, fashioned by the hand of man. Gloria de Lara it is, who thus questions the new-comer. A tall, powerful-looking man, with thick, bushy beard and whiskers, and a clean-shaven upper lip. He is dressed in the habiliments of a navvy, and carries on his back a bag of tools. These he throws down as he replies,