"It was more than sound, it was sympathetic," Tallente insisted. "That is why I worked myself into the state of indignation which induced me to write it. I will not defend it. It is sufficient to remind you both that when we were hard pressed, when England really had her back to the wall, when coal was the very blood of life to her, a strike was declared in South Wales and received the open sympathy of the faction with which this man Miller here is associated. Miller has spoken plainly about me. Let him hear what I have to say about him. He went down to South Wales to visit these miners and he encouraged them in a course of action which, if other industries had followed suit, would have brought this country into slavery and disgrace. And furthermore, let me remind you of this, Dartrey. It was Miller's branch of the Labour Party who sent him to Switzerland to confer with enemy Socialists and for the last eighteen months of the war he practically lived under the espionage of our secret service--a suspected traitor." "It's a lie!" Miller fumed. "It is the truth and easily proved," Tallente retorted. "When peace came, however, Miller's party altered their tactics and the hatchet was to have been buried. My article was directed against the trades unions as they were at that time, not as they are to-day, and I still claim that if public opinion had not driven them into an arrangement with the Government, my article would have been published and would have done good. To publish it now could answer no useful purpose. Its application is gone and the conditions which prompted its tone disappeared." "I am beginning to understand," Dartrey admitted. "Tell me, how did the manuscript ever leave your possession, Tallente?" "I will tell you," Tallente replied, pointing over at Miller. "Because that man paid Palliser, my secretary, five thousand pounds out of his secret service money to obtain possession of it." Miller was plainly discomfited. "Who told you that lie?" he faltered. "It's no lie--it's the truth," Tallente rejoined. "You used five thousand pounds of secret service money to gratify a private spite." "That's false, anyhow," Miller retorted. "I have no personal spite against you, Tallente. I look upon you as a dangerous man in our party, and if I have sought for means to remove you from it, it has been not from personal feeling, but for the good of the cause." "There stands your leader," Tallente continued. "Did you consult him before you bribed my secretary and hawked about that article, first to Horlock and now to heaven knows whom?" "It is the first I have heard of it," Dartrey said sternly. "Just so. It goes to prove what I have declared before--that Miller's attack upon me is a personal one."