“Good stuff, sir,” he declared approvingly, as he passed it back. “After dinner I am mostly a man of peace--even when Fenn comes yapping around,” he added, looking after the disappearing figure of the secretary. “But I make no secret of this. I tumbled to it from the first that this was a great proposition, this amalgamation of Labour. It makes a power of us, even though it may, as you, Mr. Orden, said in one of your articles, bring us to the gates of revolution. But it was all I could do to bring myself to sit down at the same table with Fenn and his friend Bright. You see,” he explained, “there may be times when you are forced into doing a thing that fundamentally you disapprove of and you know is wrong. I disapprove of this war, and I know it’s wrong--it’s a foul mess that we’ve been got into by those who should have known better--but I ain’t like Fenn about it. We’re in it, and we’ve got to get out of it, not like cowards but like Englishmen, and if fighting had been the only way through, then I should have been for fighting to the last gasp. Fortunately, we’ve got into touch with the sensible folk on the other side. If we hadn’t--well, I’ll say no more but that I’ve got two boys fighting and one buried at Ypres, and I’ve another, though he’s over young, doing his drill.” “Mr. Cross,” Julian said, “you’ve done me more good than any one I’ve talked to since the war began.” “That’s right, lad,” Cross replied. “You get straight words from one; and not only that, you get the words of another million behind me, who feel as I do. But,” he added, glancing across the room and lowering his voice, “keep your eye on that artful devil, Fenn. He doesn’t bear you any particular good will.” “He wasn’t exactly a hospitable gaoler,” Julian reminiscently observed. “I’m not speaking of that only,” Cross went on. “There wasn’t one of us who didn’t vote for squeezing that document out of you one way or the other, and if it had been necessary to screw your neck off for it, I don’t know as one of us would have hesitated, for you were standing between us and the big thing. But he and that little skunk Bright ain’t to be trusted, in my mind, and it seems to me they’ve got a down on you. Fenn counted on being heart of this Council, for one thing, and there’s a matter of a young woman, eh, for another?” “A young woman?” Julian repeated. Cross nodded. “The Russian young person--Miss Abbeway, she calls herself. Fenn’s been her lap-dog round here--takes her out to dine and that. It’s just a word of warning, that’s all. You’re new amongst us, Mr. Orden, and you might think us all honest men. Well, we ain’t; that’s all there is to it.” Julian recovered from a momentary fit of astonishment. “I am much obliged to you for your candour, Mr. Cross,” he said. “And never you mind about the ‘Mr.’, sir,” the Northumbrian begged. “Nor you about the ‘sir’,” Julian retorted, with a smile.