“But you don’t intend to stay here, Sidney?”

“Yes, I do; and I will tell you why.  I am helping to liberate those Manchester laborers who were my father’s slaves.  To bring that about, their fellow slaves all over the world must unite in a vast international association of men pledged to share the world’s work justly; to share the produce of the work justly; to yield not a farthing—­charity apart—­to any full-grown and able-bodied idler or malingerer, and to treat as vermin in the commonwealth persons attempting to get more than their share of wealth or give less than their share of work.  This is a very difficult thing to accomplish, because working-men, like the people called their betters, do not always understand their own interests, and will often actually help their oppressors to exterminate their saviours to the tune of ’Rule Britannia,’ or some such lying doggerel.  We must educate them out of that, and, meanwhile, push forward the international association of laborers diligently.  I am at present occupied in propagating its principles.  Capitalism, organized for repressive purposes under pretext of governing the nation, would very soon stop the association if it understood our aim, but it thinks that we are engaged in gunpowder plots and conspiracies to assassinate crowned heads; and so, whilst the police are blundering in search of evidence of these, our real work goes on unmolested.  Whether I am really advancing the cause is more than I can say.  I use heaps of postage stamps, pay the expenses of many indifferent lecturers, defray the cost of printing reams of pamphlets and hand-bills which hail the laborer flatteringly as the salt of the earth, write and edit a little socialist journal, and do what lies in my power generally.  I had rather spend my ill-gotten wealth in this way than upon an expensive house and a retinue of servants.  And I prefer my corduroys and my two-roomed chalet here to our pretty little house, and your pretty little ways, and my pretty little neglect of the work that my heart is set upon.  Some day, perhaps, I will take a holiday; and then we shall have a new honeymoon.”

For a moment Henrietta seemed about to cry.  Suddenly she exclaimed with enthusiasm:  “I will stay with you, Sidney.  I will share your work, whatever it may be.  I will dress as a dairymaid, and have a little pail to carry milk in.  The world is nothing to me except when you are with me; and I should love to live here and sketch from nature.”

He blenched, and partially rose, unable to conceal his dismay.  She, resolved not to be cast off, seized him and clung to him.  This was the movement that excited the derision of Wickens’s boy in the adjacent gravel pit.  Trefusis was glad of the interruption; and, when he gave the boy twopence and bade him begone, half hoped that he would insist on remaining.  But though an obdurate boy on most occasions, he proved complaisant on this, and withdrew to the high road, where he made over one of his pennies to a phantom gambler, and tossed with him until recalled from his dual state by the appearance of Fairholme’s party.