“I’m answering it now,” he interrupted. “From here I go to King’s Cross and from King’s Cross to the north. Putting things to the test. I shall be back again in just the time that it takes us to walk here.” As he disappeared from sight, Barbara commented admiringly on his exit: “For a third curtain, it was unsurpassed. I _do_ want to know what’s going to happen in the last act.” 4 If I did not know then, I had a strength of conviction that amounted almost to knowledge. There was going to be public excitement; there was going to be loose speaking; there was going to be bad blood. And, after that, there might well be rioting. I have replayed the game a hundred times since that day and asked myself what I could have done to change the issue. Before the war I should have talked to Bertrand; and, if he had shared my apprehensions, he would have spoken a word to the responsible ministers. With this new government of men unknown to me, with this new House no longer even in session, there was no one I could approach. During the war, when we broke down most of the interdepartmental walls, a telephone message from the Admiralty would have stirred sympathetic chords in Scotland Yard or the Home Office. Now I had long severed my connection with the public service; Philip Hornbeck was my one remaining link; and, if I bothered him again, I ran the risk of being told that Griffiths was become a bee in my bonnet. This notwithstanding, I did ask Barbara to arrange a dinner; and I am only sorry that I did not make the invitation more urgent. “Is anything the matter?,” she asked in some surprise, for Hornbeck had dined with us only two or three nights before. “Not at the moment; but there may be trouble if some one doesn’t spike that fellow Griffiths’ guns. In his way, the man’s right: as the government _has_ no remedy, you can’t find an answer to people who say they’ll take the remedy into their own hands. But the common sense of the world won’t allow that. Griffiths will be refused a hearing; the mob may break a few windows; and then the police will clear the streets. It’s not worth marching an army three hundred miles to learn that old lesson.” “Until they’ve learnt it, they’ll go on believing in men like Griffiths,” said Barbara. “But it will be a more costly lesson than they realize. With the best intentions in the world, he’s marching them into a trap. I want Hornbeck to stop the march and break up the units before they can collect in force.”