Denzil puffed his cigarette, unembarrassed.  Peter bent attentively over his work, making nervous stabs with his awl.  There was a long silence.  An organ-grinder played a waltz outside, unregarded; and, failing to annoy anybody, moved on.  Denzil lit another cigarette.  The dirty-faced clock on the wall chimed twelve.

“What do you think,” said Crowl, “of Republics?”

“They are low,” Denzil replied.  “Without a Monarch there is no visible incarnation of Authority.”

“What! do you call Queen Victoria visible?”

“Peter, do you want to drive me from the house?  Leave frivolousness to women, whose minds are only large enough for domestic difficulties.  Republics are low.  Plato mercifully kept the poets out of his.  Republics are not congenial soil for poetry.”

“What nonsense!  If England dropped its fad of Monarchy and became a Republic to-morrow, do you mean to say that—?”

“I mean to say there would be no Poet Laureate to begin with.”

“Who’s fribbling now, you or me, Cantercot?  But I don’t care a button-hook about poets, present company always excepted.  I’m only a plain man, and I want to know where’s the sense of givin’ any one person authority over everybody else?”

“Ah, that’s what Tom Mortlake used to say.  Wait till you’re in power, Peter, with trade-union money to control, and working men bursting to give you flying angels and to carry you aloft, like a banner, huzzahing.”

“Ah, that’s because he’s head and shoulders above ’em already,” said Crowl, with a flash in his sad grey eyes.  “Still, it don’t prove that I’d talk any different.  And I think you’re quite wrong about his being spoilt.  Tom’s a fine fellow—­a man every inch of him, and that’s a good many.  I don’t deny he has his weaknesses, and there was a time when he stood in this very shop and denounced that poor dead Constant.  ‘Crowl,’ said he, ’that man’ll do mischief.  I don’t like these kid-glove philanthropists mixing themselves up in practical labour disputes they don’t understand.’”

Denzil whistled involuntarily.  It was a piece of news.

“I dare say,” continued Crowl, “he’s a bit jealous of anybody’s interference with his influence.  But in this case the jealousy did wear off, you see, for the poor fellow and he got quite pals, as everybody knows.  Tom’s not the man to hug a prejudice.  However, all that don’t prove nothing against Republics.  Look at the Czar and the Jews.  I’m only a plain man, but I wouldn’t live in Russia not for—­not for all the leather in it!  An Englishman, taxed as he is to keep up his Fad of Monarchy, is at least king in his own castle, whoever bosses it at Windsor.  Excuse me a minute, the missus is callin’.”

“Excuse me a minute.  I’m going, and I want to say before I go—­I feel it only right you should know at once—­that after what has passed to-day I can never be on the same footing here as in the—­shall I say pleasant?—­days of yore.”