nature would not be strong enough to arrest its triumphant course." "Hear! hear!" said Mr Vossit perfunctorily, as he looked round solicitously for his hat. "Well, I suppose we may as well be going." Cecil Brown recalled his wistful smile from the contemplation of a future chequered with many scenes of light and shade. "I thank you, Sir John," he replied with a look of friendly understanding, "but I also must go down with my own party." "I hope that the decision in neither case will be irrevocable," said Hampden with regret, but as he spoke he knew that the hope was vain. They had already begun to file out of the room, with a touch here and there of that air of constraint that the party had never been quite able to shake off on ceremonial occasions. They left Mr Tubes cowering before the stove, and raising his head nervously from time to time to listen to the noises of the street. Mr Guppling, determined that his claims should not escape the eye of Fame, paused at the door. "When we leave this room, John Hampden," he proclaimed in a loud and impressive voice, and throwing out his hand with an appropriate gesture, "we leave Liberty behind us, bound, gagged, and helpless, on the floor!" "Very true, Mr Guppling," replied Sir John good-humouredly. "We will devote our first efforts to releasing her." Mr Guppling smiled a bitter, cutting smile, and left the shaft to rankle. It was not until he was out in the street that a sense of the possible ambiguity of his unfortunate remark overwhelmed him with disgust. CHAPTER XXII "POOR ENGLAND." With the account of the signing of the dissolution terms, and a brief reference to the sweeping victory of the League party--already foreshadowed, indeed, to the point of the inevitable--the unknown chronicler, whose version of the Social War this narrative has followed, brings his annals to a close. That war being finished, and by the repudiation of their Socialistic mentors on the part of a large section of the working classes, finished by more than a mere paper treaty, the worthy scribe announces with praiseworthy restraint that there is no more to be said. "These men," he declares, in the quaint and archaic language of the past,--and he might surely have added "these women" also--"came not reluctantly, but in no wise ambitiously, out of the business of their own private lives to serve their country as they deemed; and that being accomplished to a successful end, would have returned, nothing loth, to more obscure affairs, having sought no personal gain beyond that which grew from public security, an equitable burden of citizenship, and a recovered pride among the nations. Albeit some must needs remain to carry on the work."