"My God!" said Vane, "as bad as that! I was hoping he'd eat peas with his knife." She looked towards the door and suddenly stood up. "Here he is, coming down the stairs now. . . ." She held out her hand to him as he came up. "I was afraid you weren't going to come, Mr. Ramage." "Am I late?" he answered, glancing at his watch. "A thousand apologies, Mrs. Smallwood. . . . A committee meeting. . . ." He turned towards Vane and she introduced the two men, who followed her into the restaurant. And in his first quick glance Vane was conscious of a certain disappointment, and a distinct feeling of surprise. Far from being clad in corduroy, Ramage had on a very respectable morning coat. In fact, it struck him that Nancy Smallwood's remark exactly described him. He looked _most_ respectable--not to say dull. By no stretch of imagination could Vane imagine him as the leader of a great cause. He might have been a country lawyer, or a general practitioner, or any of those eminently worthy things with which utility rather than brilliance is generally associated. He recalled what he had read in the papers--paragraphs describing meetings at which Mr. Ramage had taken a prominent part, and his general recollection of most of them seemed to be summed up in the one sentence . . . "the meeting then broke up in disorder, Mr. Ramage escaping with difficulty through a window at the back." Somehow he could not see this decorous gentleman opposite escaping through windows under a barrage of bad eggs. He failed to fill the part completely. As a cashier in a local bank gravely informing a customer that his account was overdrawn--yes; but as a fighter, as a man who counted for something in the teeming world around--why no. . . . Not as far as appearance went, at any rate. And at that moment the eyes of the two men met for an instant across the table. . . . It seemed to Vane almost as if he had received a blow--so sudden was the check to his mental rambling. For the eyes of the man opposite, deep set and gleaming, were the eyes of greatness, and they triumphed so completely over their indifferent setting that Vane marvelled at his previous obtuseness. Martyrs have had such eyes, and the great pioneers of the world--men who have deemed everything well lost for a cause, be that cause right or wrong. And almost as if he were standing there in the flesh, there came to him a vision of Sir James raving furiously against this man. He watched him with a slightly puzzled frown for a moment. This was the man who was deliberately leading the masses towards discontent and revolt; this was the man of intellect who was deliberately using his gift to try to ruin the country. . . . So Sir James had said; so Vane had always understood. And his frown grew more puzzled. Suddenly Ramage turned and spoke to him. A faint smile hovered for a second around his lips, as if he had noticed the frown and interpreted its cause aright.