blindly anybody who played the Marseillaise as Geisner did.  He was ready to echo any ringing thought that appealed to him as good and noble.  But he did not know.  He could see that in the idea called by Mrs. Stratton “the Cause” there was an understood meaning which fitted his aspirations and his desires.  He had gathered, his narrow bigotry washed from him, that between each and all of those whom he had just left there was a bond of union, a common thought, an accepted way.  He had met them strangers, and had left them warm friends.  The cartoonist, white with rage at the memory of the high rectory wall that shut the beautiful from the English poor; the gloomy poet whose verses rang still in his ears and would live in his heart for ever; the gray-eyed woman who idolised Art, as Nellie said, and fanned still the fire in which her nearest kin had perished; the pressman, with his dream of a free press that would not serve the money power; the painter to whom the chiselled stone spoke; the pretty girl who had been cradled amid barricades; the quiet musician for whom the bitterness of death was past, born leader of men, commissioned by that which stamped him what he was; the dressmaking girl, passionately pleading the cause of Woman; even himself, drinking in this new life as the ground sucks up the rain after a drought; between them all there was a bond—­“the Cause.”  What was this Cause?  To break down all walls, to overthrow all wrong, to destroy the ugliness of human life, to free thought, to elevate Art, to purify Love, to lift mankind higher, to give equality to women, to—­to—­he did not see exactly where he himself came in—­all this was the Cause.  Yet he did not quite understand it, just the same.  Nor did he know how it was all to come about.  But he intended to find out.  So he asked Nellie what the Strattons believed, feeling instinctively that there must be belief in something.

“What do they believe?” he had asked.

“In Socialism,” Nellie had answered.

“Socialism!  Look here, Nellie!  What is Socialism?” he had exclaimed.

They neared a lamp, shining mistily in the drizzle.  Close at hand was a seat, facing the grass.  In the dim light was what looked like a bundle of rags thrown over the seat and trailing to the ground.  Nellie stopped.  It was a woman, sleeping.

There, under a leafy tree, whose flat branches shielded her somewhat from the rain, slept the outcast.  She had dozed off into slumber, sitting there alone.  She was not lying, only sitting there, her arm flung over the back of the seat, her head fallen on her shoulder, her face upturned to the pitying night.  It was the face of a street-walker, bloated and purplish, the poor pretence of colour gone, the haggard lines showing, all the awful life of her stamped upon it; yet in the lamplight, upturned in its helplessness, sealed with the sleep that had come at last to her, sore-footed, as softly as it might have come to a little