Mr. Perry-Hennington came rather in the nature of an anticlimax. He had no pretensions to be considered an orator, as he was careful to warn his hearers at the outset; he had nothing to say that had not already been said far better in print, yet he felt it to be his duty to stand on a public platform and declaim obvious truths which the newspapers of the realm had weeks ago made banal and threadbare. But somehow there was a driving force, a contained ferocity about Mr. Perry-Hennington’s sincerity, trite and ill-phrased as it was, which, with the aid of copious “hear, hear’s” from Mr. Speke and his old Magdalen friend, Whymper, first staved off an epidemic of coughing and then of feet-shuffling, and then of coughing again. At last he got fairly into his stride, a strong, unmusical voice increasing in violence as he did so. And as the more violent he grew the more his audience approved, they soon began to march together toward a thrilling climax. Finally he swung into his fine peroration: “We shall not lay down the sword, etc.,” which belonged to another, and ended stronger than he began amidst quite a storm of cheering. It was a mediocre performance, well within the range of any member of the educated classes, yet all who heard it seemed greatly impressed. Even Mr. Whymper and Mr. Speke seemed greatly impressed, and what was of still more importance it went home to a number of young men at the back of the room. When the meeting was over these came forward to the table at the side of the platform, at which a recruiting officer sat, and gave in their names. Nowhere else could such a scene have been enacted. To the ordinary intelligence, it was almost unbelievable that magnificent fellows in the pride of manhood could be moved to the supreme sacrifice by the jejune lucidities of Mr. Speke, and the brand of spirituality that the vicar of Penfold had to offer. Something must have been in the air of that overheated room. Behind the trite phrases, behind the rather otiose pomposities of the one, the deliberately quiet, over-varnished style of the other, must have been that spirit which, by hardly more than the breadth of a single hair, had temporarily saved civilization for mankind. XI AFTER the meeting, eight people sat down to dinner at the manor house. These were Mr. Speke, Mr. Perry-Hennington and his daughter, the host, the redoubtable hostess, and three rather crushed and colorless Miss Whympers, who were evidently in great awe of their mother.