"What of Guy Rossett?" asked Contraras abruptly, when the two men were seated. "He knows a great deal. He knows too much." "My section is dealing with his affair," replied Lucue smoothly. "Violet Hargrave and Andres Moreno are over in Spain, as of course you know." Contraras grunted. He was not in a very good mood to-night; he had not yet forgiven Lucue for his lack of punctuality. "Violet Hargrave I know, of course, a friend and protegee of our staunch old comrade Jaques. Moreno I know nothing about. Who is he, what is he?" Lucue explained. Moreno was a journalist, his father pure Spanish, his mother an Englishwoman. His principles were sound. He was a revolutionary heart and soul. Contraras was still in the grunting stage. He helped himself to another whiskey. "You are a judge of men, Lucue; you seldom make mistakes," he said, in rather a grudging voice. "I don't quite like the idea of the English mother. You have thought that all out?" "Quite," was the swift reply. "Moreno comes to us with settled convictions. He is, like yourself, a philosophical anarchist." It certainly said a good deal for Moreno's powers of persuasion that he had succeeded in convincing the suspicious Lucue of his sincerity. The gong sounded for dinner. Contraras kept to his gentlemanly habits; his house was ordered in orthodox fashion. His wife, a faded-looking woman, who had once been a beauty, sat at the head of the table. His daughter, a comely, dark-eyed girl, his only child, faced the guest. Neither wife nor daughter had the slightest sympathy with the peculiar views of the head of the household. As a matter of fact, they thought he was just a trifle insane on this one particular point. They detested the strange-looking men, some of them in very shabby raiment, who came to this well-appointed house in Fitzjohn's Avenue, to partake of their chief's hospitality and drink his choice wines. They marvelled between themselves at the blindness of Contraras. Could he not see that these shabby creatures hated him for his wealth, for the hospitality which they regarded as a form of ostentation? Several times both mother and daughter had tried to point this out to him. "Live in a little forty-pound-a-year house, without a maid, with Inez and me to scrub and cook, and they might believe in you," his wife had remarked bitterly on one occasion when her nerves had been more than usually upset by the intrusion of some very shabby looking guests. "Of course, now they reckon you up at your true value. You are making the best of the present order of things, getting the best you can out of it. Bah! What do you expect if your dreams come to pass? They will not leave you a sixpence, these wretches whom you have put into power. They will strip you at once." The visionary had smiled condescendingly. He had a poor opinion of the mental capacity of women. They had no initiative, no foresight.