“Arnold,” he said, “you must make your choice now. Lembken needs you for reasons which are patent to us, thanks to your statement. If you go back to him he can give you power and liberty to lord it over the people until the quick day of reckoning arrives. If you join us you must become an outlaw and an associate in the most desperate endeavor, play a leading part and share our dangers.” “How can you doubt me?” I asked. “I am with you, now, and at all times.” David held up his hand. “Wait!” he said. “You must first understand our situation, and why we are here tonight.” “It is not necessary, David,” I answered. “Yes, it is necessary. Because you do not know the depth of our intolerable bondage. I am going to tell you of my own life, that you may judge. “I begin with my father. As I told you, he was epileptic in youth. He outgrew the attacks, and because the Liberal government never dared to enforce the Defectives’ Law which it passed in 1930, he was able to marry, much later, a girl to whom he had been engaged for many years. They had lived quietly in what was then called Wales, in a rural community that had somehow managed to escape the excesses which began in 1945. “But my father was a marked man, because he was on the secret defectives’ list, and a Conservative. A few weeks after his marriage the storm of revolution burst over Dolgelly. The army of clerks and civil officers that followed the troops of the victorious democracy raked the country fine for victims. With his young bride my father fled to the mountains, where I was born, and they existed there, heaven knows how, till an opportunity arrived for flight abroad. When the restoration came he returned, and rebuilt his ruined home. “My father was a student of history, and he knew that the peace which had descended over the distracted country was only a lull in the storm of violence. He resolved to teach me all the old knowledge, which had fallen into decay. He wanted me to play a leading part in political life, as his forebears had done. But the second revolution was upon us when I was a youth of nineteen. Fortunately, my parents were both dead. “The mob started burning defectives then. For many there was the chance of submission to the new government, nominally under Boss Rose, which Sanson was constructing; but there was none for me, since epilepsy was then, owing to the ephemeral theory of some forgotten scientist, regarded as the unpardonable sin. I managed to escape to Denmark, and spent the next sixteen years upon the Continent, wandering from place to place as the Federation came into being. I married a Swiss lady at Lausanne, where Elizabeth was born. We had to fly by night, when the child was a week old. My wife could not survive the journey over the mountain passes in the middle of winter. She died in what was called Austria, two days after our arrival there. With Elizabeth I continued my flight eastward, and found refuge in Greece.