"Perhaps it is----" began Chadwing, and stopped. The same thought had occurred to at least three of them. Perhaps they were coming to tell them that Hampden had accepted his defeat. Whatever it might be, a dozen members who had entered the room in a confused medley were making their way towards the Premier's table. A man who seemed to concentrate their attention was in their midst; some were apparently trying to hold him back, while others urged him on. While yet some distance off he broke away from them all, and running forward, reached the table first. It was Comrade Bilch, so dishevelled, red, and heated, that it did not occur to any one to doubt that he was drunk. For a second he stood looking at them stupidly, and then he suddenly opened his mouth and poured out so appalling a string of vile and nauseating abuse that men who were near drew aside. "Why, in Heaven's name, don't you take him away?" exclaimed Cecil Brown, appealing to those who formed the group beyond the table. They would have done so, but Comrade Bilch raised his hand as though to enjoin attention for a moment. A change seemed to have come over him even in that brief passage of time. He walked up to the table and leaned heavily upon it with both fists, while his breath came in throbs, and the colour played about his face like the reflection of a raging fire. When he spoke it was without a single oath; all his uncleanness had dropped away from him as though he recognised its threadbare poverty in the face of the colossal news he brought. "Gentlemen," he said, leaning forward and breathing very hard, "you would have it, and you have got your way. You've made oil contraband, and not a drop can be landed in Great Britain now. It can't be brought, but it can be used when it is here, and the Unity League that you have done it all to starve has got two hundred million gallons safely stowed away at Hanwood! Yes, while our people will have to grope and freeze through the winter, _they_ are quite comfortably provided for, and you, whether you leave the bar on or whether you take it off, you have made us the laughing-stock of Europe!" An awed silence fell on the group. Not the most shadowy suspicion of such a miscarriage had ever stirred the most cautious. All their qualms had been in the direction of swallowing the unpalatable measure, not of doubting its efficacy. They seemed to be the puny antagonists of some almost superhuman power that not only brushed their most elaborate plans aside, but actually led them on to pave the way to their own undoing. Mr Tubes was the first to speak. "It can't be true," he whispered. "It is impossible." "Oh, everything's impossible with you, especially when it's happened," retorted Mr Bilch contemptuously. "Pity you didn't live when there were real miracles about." "But the time?" protested some one. "How could they do it in the time?"