“Thank you,” said William. “As a fact, Mr. Bradshaw, there never was.” He believed what he said, too. He believed he had never been influenced by Gertrude or convinced by Rupert. He believed he had merely toyed pleasantly with the idea, standing himself superior to it. “But that shall not prevent me from appreciating your actions, yours, Lady Hepplestall, and yours, Mr. Bradshaw. We Hepplestalls are all trustees, all of us,” he emphasized, looking at Rupert’s stiff back, “but you have shown to-day that you are sharer in the trust.” Tom wondered for a moment what was the polite conversational equivalent of ironical cheers; William was escaping too easily, but the chief point was not the regent but the heir, Mary’s Rupert, and he could spare William the knowledge that he had deceived nobody. “Sir Rupert spoke just now,” he said, “of the rights of property. They are rightful rights only when they are matched with a sense of responsibility, and capital that forgets responsibility is going to get it in the neck.” “We have,” said William superbly, “the idea of service in this firm.” “Man,” said Tom, “if you hadn’t had, I shouldn’t be here to-day talking to you in headlines. If you hadn’t had that idea and if you hadn’t lived up to it and if I didn’t hope you’d go _on_ living up to it, I’d have had a very different duty. Shall I tell you what that duty would have been, Sir Rupert? To keep my mouth shut and let you sell. The higher you sold the higher they’d resell when they floated their company, and the sooner they’d start squeezing the blood out of Staithley.” Rupert turned a puzzled face. “That would have been your duty? Why?” he asked. “Hot fevers are short,” said Tom. “It ‘ud bring the end more quickly. I don’t know if you read the _Times_. If you do you may have seen that they mentioned my name the other day along with some more and called us the elder statesmen of the Labor Party. Too old to hurry. Brakes on the wheels of progress. Maybe; but I’m one that looks for other roads than the road that leads to revolution and you Hepplestalls have been a sign-post on a road I like. You’ve been too busy overpaying yourselves to go far up the road yet, but you’re leaders of the cotton trade and by the Lord that ship needs captaincy. That’s why I didn’t do what lots in the Party would tell me was my duty--to let you rip, and rip another rent in the rotting fabric of capitalism.” Mary’s hand was on his arm. “Because you love the Hepplestalls,” she said. “And me a Bradshaw?” he said indignantly. “Me a Labor Member and they capital? Did you ever hear of the two old men who’d been mortal enemies all their lives, and when one of them was killed in a railway accident, the other took to his bed and died because he’d nothing left to live for? That’s me and the Hepplestalls.” She shook her head, smiling. “It’s not like that,” she said.