“No doubt,” said the vicar. “Yet hardly so grave a one as you might think. It is the only right, reasonable and charitable view to take of him. And if the medical profession cannot be brought to do its clear and obvious duty, the man will have to be dealt with in some other and less gentle way.” “I am beginning to wish I hadn’t spoken of the matter,” said Edith, in an anxious tone. “My dear,” said the vicar, shaking up old Alice, “in mentioning it, disagreeable and distressing as it may be, you did no more than your duty. You must now leave other people to do theirs, and at the same time you must have the good sense to dismiss the matter entirely from your thoughts.” Again Edith shivered. But further discussion was forbidden by their journey’s end. They had now reached the outskirts of Grayfield, and the gates of the manor were before them. X THERE was a very stimulating meeting in the parish room. The squire of Grayfield, the vicar’s Magdalen friend, Whymper, was by divine right in the chair. He was a dry, melancholy, exanimate sort of creature; a man of few words and very pronounced dislikes, not without force in a narrow way, but locally of more account as the husband of Lady Jane than from any native quality. Still, he made an excellent chairman. Brief, concise, self-effacing, he loathed his job; anything in the nature of speechifying bored him extremely, and he had a rooted objection “to making an ass of himself in public,” but natural grit and a high sense of duty pulled him through. In fact he did his job so well that it would have been hard for any man to improve on his performance. There were only two speakers. One was the vicar of Penfold, but he was not the person who had filled the parish room to overflowing. A famous member of Parliament, a reputed master of the forensic arts, was spending a week-end at the manor house, and he had kindly consented to rouse the young men of the district. This paladin, who spoke before the vicar, was a tall thin-faced man of forty-five, who hardly looked his age. George Speke by name, he was the kind of man no British government is ever without, and he discoursed the commonest of common sense with an air of ease and authenticity. He put the case for Britain and her allies with a force and a cogency that none could gainsay. And in that room at any rate, there was not the slightest wish to gainsay it. Even the group of young men at the back of the room, upon whom the local constable and two specials kept a vigilant eye, and to whom Mr. Speke’s remarks were addressed officially, showed no inclination to traverse his clear statement of historical fact. It was a very finished effort, and somehow it moved his audience.