He peeped up at her, only his eyes moving, small, black-brown, and burning like a bear's. "That's better," he muttered. She flashed up at him. Innocence and cunning, the schoolboy and the brute, Pan and Silenus fought, leered, and frolicked in his face. Ruth dropped her gaze and kneaded very deliberately. Yes ... it was so ... Now she would help him; and she could hold him. She would transmute his passion into friendship. She would bridle her bull, ride him, tame him. It was dangerous, and she loved danger. It was sport; and she loved sport. It was an adventure after the heart of a daring woman. He was a fine man, too, and fierce, warrior and orator; worth conquering and subduing to her will. His quality of a fighting male called to her. She felt the challenge and answered it with singing blood. That laughing hidalgo who in Elizabethan days had landed from his galleon in the darks at the Haven to bring terror and romance to some Sussex maid; that Spaniard who lurked obscurely in her blood, gave her her swarthy colouring, her indolent magnificence and surprising quality, was stirring uneasily within her once again. She lifted her eyes from the froth of yeast and looked across at him, accepting battle--if he meant battle. And he did: there was no doubt of that. He sat there, hunched, silent, breathing heavily. Then little Alice slipped down from the kitchen table on which she had been sitting at her mother's side, danced across to her friend, and climbed up on his knee. Ruth took her arms out of the bowl, white to the elbow with flour, came across to the pair, firm-faced, and deliberately removed the child. Joe rose and went out. In the outer door he stumbled on a man half-hidden on the threshold. "That you, Joe?" said Ernie quietly. "There he is! Alf--on the spy. See his head bob--there! At the bottom of Borough Lane--It's her he's after." Joe peeped over his friend's shoulder, his bullet head thrust out like a dog who scents an enemy. "That sort; is he?" he muttered. "I'll after him!" CHAPTER XVII THE CHALLENGE Joe Burt had that passion for saving souls which is the hall-mark of the missionary in every age. Had he been a child of the previous generation he would have become a minister in some humble denomination and done his fighting from the pulpit, Bible in hand, amid the pot-banks of a Black Country township or the grimy streets of a struggling mining village in the North. As it was he appealed to the mass from the platform, and, a true fisher of men, flung his net about the individual in the class-room and at conferences. Always seeking fresh fields to conquer, he had established a political footing now even in Tory Old Town. He had opened a discussion at the Institute, and actually given an address to the local Church of England's Men's Society on Robert Owen and early English Socialists; and he owed his triumph in the main to Bobby Chislehurst.