The last was purely rhetorical, for no one on the staff of the New Dawn believed that God helped any one.  Indeed, it was rather felt that God was on the side of privilege.  But the speaker glowed as he achieved his period.

“If you would only try to get our point of view,” again suggested Harvey D., as he straightened the Reading From Homer.

“I cannot turn aside.”

“Meaning?” inquired Sharon Whipple.

“Meaning that we cannot accept another dollar of tainted money for our great work,” said Merle, crisply.

“Oh,” said Sharon, “but that’s what your pa just told you!  You accepted it till he shut off on you.”

“Against my better judgment and with many misgivings,” returned the apostle of light.  “Now we can go to the bitter end with no false sense of obligation.”

“But your magazine will have to stop, I fear,” interposed Gideon gently.

Merle smiled wanly, shaking his head the while as one who contradicts from superior knowledge.

“You little know us,” he retorted when the full effect of the silent, head-shaking smile had been had.  “The people are at last roused.  Money will pour in upon us.  Money is the last detail we need think of.  Our movement is solidly grounded.  We have at our back”—­he glanced defiantly at each of the three Whipples—­“an awakened proletariat.”

“My!” said Gideon.

“You are out of the current here,” explained Merle, kindly.  “You don’t suspect how close we are to revolution.  Yet that glorious rising of our comrades in Russia might have warned you.  But your class, of course, never is warned.”

“Dear me!” broke in Harvey D.  “You don’t mean to say that conditions are as bad here as they were in Russia?”

“Worse—­a thousand times worse,” replied Merle.  “We have here an autocracy more hateful, more hideous in its injustices, than ever the Romanoffs dreamed of.  And how much longer do you think these serfs of ours will suffer it?  I tell you they are roused this instant!  They await only a word!”

“Are you going to speak it?” demanded Sharon.

“Now, now!” soothed Harvey D. as Merle turned heatedly upon Sharon, who thus escaped blasting.

“I am not here to be baited,” protested Merle.

“Of course not, my boy,” said the distressed Harvey D.

Merle faced the latter.

“I need not say that this decision of yours—­this abrupt withdrawal, of your cooperation—­must make a profound difference in our relations.  I feel the cause too deeply for it to be otherwise.  You understand?”

“He’s casting you off,” said Sharon, “like the other one said he would.”

“Ssh!” It was Gideon.

“I shall stay no longer to listen to mere buffoonery,” and for the last time that night Merle swept back the ever-falling lock.  He paused at the door.  “The old spirit of intolerance,” he said.  “You are the sort who wouldn’t accept truth in France in 1789, or in Russia the other day.”  And so he left them.