Brent heard what the superintendent said, nodded a silent reply, and five minutes later had put that particular thing clean out of his mind. During the progress of the Local Government Board inquiry he had learned something: that men like Tansley and Epplewhite knew a lot more about Hathelsborough and Hathelsborough folk than he did, or than Wallingford had known, despite the murdered man's longer experience of town and people. Reform was not going to be carried out in a day in that time-worn borough, nor were its ancient customs, rotten and corrupt as they were, to be uprooted by newspaper articles. So far, Simon Crood and his gang had won all along the line, and Brent realized that most men in his position would have given up the contest and retired from the field in weariness and disgust. But he was not going to give up, nor to retire. He had a feeling, amounting to something near akin to a superstition, that it was his sacred duty to carry on his dead cousin's work, especially as Wallingford, by leaving him all his money, had provided him with the means of doing it. There in Hathelsborough he was, and in Hathelsborough he would stick, holding on like a bulldog to the enemy. "I'm not counted out!" he said that evening, talking the proceedings of the day over with Queenie. "I'm up again and ready for the next round. Here I am, and here I stop! But new tactics! Permeation! that's the ticket. Reckon I'll nitrate and percolate the waters of pure truth into these people in such a fashion that they'll come to see that what that old uncle of yours and his precious satellites have been giving 'em was nothing but a very muddy mixture. Permeation! that's the game in future." Queenie scarcely knew what he meant. But she gathered a sense of it from the set of his square jaw and the flash of his grey eyes; being increasingly in love with him, it was incomprehensible to her that anybody could beat Brent at any game he took a hand in. "The inquiry was all cut-and-dried business," remarked Queenie. "Arranged! Of course the accounts and things would be cooked. Uncle Simon and Mallett and Coppinger would see to that. They'll have an extra bottle to-night over this victory. And if they could only hear to-morrow that you're going to clear out their joy would be full." "Well, I'm not!" declared Brent. "Instead of clearing out, I'm going to dig in. I guess they'll find me entrenched harder than ever before long. We'll get on at that to-morrow, now that this all-hollow inquiry's over."