Free Unknown by Unknown

was a swimming blur,
    “I can't argue . . . with you , . .” he jerked out as if each word carried with it a streak of his heart's blood, “but I know that ... if the masses . . . the masses of workers . . . the real workers . . . got . . . got the machinery and the . * . the land and water . . into their hands . ? . a new spirit ... not known before in all the history ... of ... of ... of humanity conscious of its fate . . . would be stronger, greater, more . . . more . . . more god . . . more godlike than anything that your great selfish individuals have . . . have felt”
    In his emotion the young man had lurched to his feet, and had seized with his fingers a half-cut loaf of bread which he began squeezing spasmodically. Aunt Elizabeth stretched forth her hand and removed this object; but not before that particular gesture in this darkening room, with the damp, green lawn and the sombre cedar outside, had caught John's attention as something symbolic. Long afterward John remembered that clumsy, bucolic figure leaning forward over the shadowy, unlit table and clutching that bread. With far more force than the slender Percy's eloquence those awkward, blurted words seemed to carry the seal of prophecy upon them. A green-coloured gust of rainy wind came rushing across that spacious garden, came swishing and swirling through the laurel-bushes, came moaning through the cedar-boughs.
    “Just touch the bell, would you, Mary, so that they know we want the lamp?” broke in the voice of Tilly Crow.
    The coming of the lamp changed the whole mental atmosphere of that group of people. It brought their minds back from the vibrations of the ideal to the agitations of the real. As the round orb of light was placed in the centre of the great table there entered the devastating reminder that forty thousand pounds' worth of power over the lives of men and women had passed from this comfortable room, from this secluded lawn, into some little shabby domicile at Glastonbury.
    “How many children has this lucky person got, Philip?” enquired Mary in a low voice.
    “Two,” was Philip's laconic answer,
    “But didn't you say he was a nuisance?” persisted Mary Crow.
    “Two great sprawling girls,” sneered Philip. “I suppose they'll buy Chalice House; or try and get the Bishop to sell them Abbey House and turn out Euphemia Drew.”
    “Oh, I hope they will!” cried Mary.
    “You hope they will?”
    “I'm tired of Abbey House. Fd like the fun of seeing Miss Drew choose new wall-papers.”
    “I'm afraid you'll never get that pleasure, Mary,” said Aunt Elizabeth, “ Themia was horn in the Abbey House and she'll die in the Abbey House.”
    “It's all very well for you, Elizabeth,” piped up Tilly Crow in a voice like that of a melancholy meadow-pipit, “you've got your two hundred a year.”
    “Yes, and I'm going to leave you in peace, too, Tilly, and live on my two hundred a year, i shall take one of those little workmen's cottages in Benedict Street that the town-council put up!” Philip turned upon her with good-humoured bluster. “You'll take nothing of the sort, Aunt,” he cried. “Why, those wretched socialistic cardboard toys don”t even keep the rain out."
    “It's simply disgraceful of you, Philip,” threw in Persephone, “the way you do all you can to make the work of that town-council of yours so difficult.”
    “By the way,” exclaimed Philip suddenly, disregarding her protest and speaking in a raised and carefully modulated voice, “where do you intend to sleep tonight, Cousin John?”
    “Philip reads all our thoughts, you know,” murmured Aunt Elizabeth. “He thinks you've got an eye to that big sofa in the drawTing-room.”
    “There won't be any sleeping on sofas in a house where I am!”5 cried Tilly Crow sharply. Her voice sounded so exactly like the miserable tweet-tweet of a bird soaked in a windy rain that John felt disarmed and sorry for her.
    “Don't be afraid, Philip,” he said, “and don't