be.  And into the pretty print of the scene on his mind, like a humped marine beast rising through a summer sea, there obtruded the recollection of the little solicitor, the graceless embarrassment that he had shown at the beginning of the interview by purposeless rubbings of his hands and twisting of the ankles, the revelation of ugly sexual quality which he had given by his shame at the story of the bed that was made an altar.  He looked at her sharply and said to himself:  “I wonder....”

Oh, surely not!  The note of her face was pure expectancy.  As yet she had come upon nothing fundamental of any kind.  He had no prepossessions in favour of innocence, and he put people who did not make love in the same class as vegetarians, but he was immensely relieved.  He would have hated this fine thing to have fallen into clumsy hands.

There was, he realised, not the smallest excuse for staying with her any longer.  “Good-bye; I hope I’ll see you at the meeting,” he said; and then, since he remembered how keen she was on being businesslike, “and look after my villa for me.”

“Yes, we’ll do that,” she said competently, and looked after him with smiling eyes.  “Oh, he looks most adventurous!” she thought.  “I wonder, now, if he’s ever killed a man?”

II

“Is my frock hooked up all the way down?” wondered Ellen, as she stood with her back to a pillar in the Synod Hall.  “Not that I care a button about it myself, but for the sake of the Cause....”  But that small worry was just one dark leaf floating on the quick sunlit river of her mind, for she was very happy and excited at these Suffrage meetings.  She had taken seven shillings and sixpence for pamphlets, the hall was filling up nicely, and Miss Traquair and Dr. Katherine Kennedy and Miss Mackenzie and several members of the local militant suffrage society had spoken to her as they went to their places just as if they counted her grown-up and one of themselves.  And she was flushed with the sense of love and power that comes of comradeship.  She looked back into the hideous square hall, with its rows of chattering anticipant people, and up to the gallery packed with faces dyed yellowish drab by the near unmitigated gas sunburst, and she smiled brilliantly.  All these people were directing their attention and enthusiasm to the same end as herself:  would feel no doubt the same tightness of throat as the heroic women came on the platform, and would sanctify the emotion as sane by sharing it; and by their willingness to co-operate in rebellion were making her individual rebellious will seem less like a schoolgirl’s penknife and more like a soldier’s sword.  “I’m being a politikon Zoon!” she boasted to herself.  She had always liked the expression when she read it in The Scotsman Leaders.