"You've no suspicions?" I ventured to ask.

"Oh, suspicions, certainly." He looked at me shrewdly and with a spice of disfavour. "Candidly, I suspect your friend Miss Davenant."

"Why her in particular?" I asked carelessly.

"By a process of exclusion. The old constitutional agitators, the Blacks and the Campions and that lot, are out of the question; they've publicly denounced the slightest breach of the law. I acquit the Old Militants, too--the Gregorys and Haseldines and Ganons. They're too stupid, for one thing; they go on burning houses and breaking windows in their old fatuous way. And for another thing they haven't the nerve...."

"There are a good many Hunger-Strikers among them," I interposed, probably with the dishonest intention of spreading his suspicions over the widest possible area.

"Less than before," he answered. "And their arch-Hunger-Striker, the Haseldine woman, carried meat lozenges with her the last time she visited Holloway. No, they're cowards. If you want brain and courage you must look to a little group of women who detached themselves from the Old Militant party. Mrs. Millington was one and Miss Davenant was another."

"The eminently moderate staff of the ultra-constitutional _New Militant_," I said as I prepared to leave.

"If you've any influence with either of those women and want to save them a long stretch of penal servitude, now's your time to warn them."

"Good Heavens! you don't suppose I'm admitted to their counsels!"

"You could advise them as a friend."

"When you tell me there's not enough suspicion to carry into court? I fear they wouldn't listen."

"They might prefer to stop play before their luck turns," he answered as he accompanied me to the door. "Their quiescent state is the most significant, most suspicious, most damning thing about them. If a house-breaker opened a religious bookshop, you might think he had reformed. Or you might think he was preparing an extra large coup. Or you might think he sold sermons by day and cracked cribs by night."

"What cynics you public men are!" I exclaimed as I ran down the steps and turned in the direction of Chester Square.

I have said that "Providence" is not one of my star _roles_, and I had every reason to know that my eloquence was unavailing when set to the task of converting Joyce from her militant campaign. However, I have seen stones worn away by constant dripping.... And in any case I had not been near the house for nearly two days.

"I'm afraid you can't see Joyce," Elsie told me as we shook hands.

"She wouldn't go to bed when the doctor told her, and now she's really rather bad."

I was more upset by the news than I care to say, but Elsie hastened to assure me.

"It's nothing much so far," she said. "But she's got a temperature and can't sleep, and worries a good deal."

"Can't we get her away?" I exclaimed impatiently.

Elsie shook her head.

"I've tried, but she simply won't leave town."

"But what's to keep her?"

"There's the paper every week."

It always annoys me to find any one thinking the world will come to an end unless run on his or her own favourite lines.

"If she died, some one else would have to edit it," I pointed out.

"Who's doing it now?"

"Mrs. Millington. I'm afraid it's no use telling people that till they _are_ dead."

"And then it's a little late in the day," I answered irritably.

Elsie proceeded to give me the real reason for Joyce's obstinacy.

"When you're dead you don't have to take responsibility for your deputy's mistakes."

"That's it, is it? Mrs. Millington setting the Thames on fire?"

"Her zeal sometimes outruns her discretion," said Elsie with a smile.

"That's what's chiefly worrying Joyce."

I picked up my hat and stick and moved towards the door.

"And Joyce is losing her nerve?" I hazarded.

"She's not up to her usual form," was all Elsie would answer.

"Give her my love," I said at the door, "and best wishes for a quick recovery. If she isn't well in two days' time, I shall carry her off by main force and put her into a nursing home."

Then I went off to lunch at the Club, and found fault with the food, the wine, the cigars and all creation. Paddy Culling opened a subscription list to buy me a box of liver pills. The Seraph--after I had been two minutes at Adelphi Terrace--said he was sorry Joyce was no better.... I thanked him for his sympathy, and sat down to read the current copy of the _New Militant_.

In my careless, hot-blooded youth I made a collection of inanimate journalistic curiosities. It was my sole offence against the wise rule that to collect anything--from wives up to postage stamps--is a mark of incipient mental decay. There was the _Punch_, with the cartoon showing the relief of Khartoum; and I remember I had a copy of the suppressed issue of the _Times_, when the compositors usurped control of Empire and edited one of Harcourt's Budget speeches on lines of their own. There was also a pink _Pall Mall Gazette_, bought wet from the machine at a shilling the copy, when paper ran out and they borrowed the pink reserve rolls of the _Globe_. I had a copy of another journal that described in moving language the massacre of the Peking Legations. The Legations were, in fact, never massacred, but they should have been on any theory of probability, and, for aught I know, the enterprising journalist may have believed with Wilde that Nature tends to copy Art.

I also had several illustrated weeklies depicting--by the pen of Our Special Artist--that first Coronation Ceremony of Edward the Seventh, and the verbal account of it given by "A Peeress" who had been present. More lately I acquired the original American paper which sent the _Titanic_ to her grave with the band playing "Nearer, my God, to Thee."...

I am half sorry the collection is dispersed. I should have liked to add the one historic number of the _New Militant_ that appeared under Mrs. Millington's fire-and-brimstone editorship. To the collector it is curious, as being the last issue of the paper; by the mental pathologist it is regarded as an interesting example of what is by common consent called "Militant Hysteria." The general public will remember it as the documentary evidence which at last enabled the police to secure a warrant of arrest against the "proprietors, printers and publishers of the newspaper called and known as the _New Militant_," to raid the printing office in Clerkenwell, and lay bare the private memoranda of the New Militant organisation.

My own copy did not survive my departure from England, and I could not do Mrs. Millington the injustice of trying to reproduce her deathless periods. I remember there was a great deal of "Where is Miss Rawnsley?

Where is Master Jefferson? Where is Miss Roden?" Such questions implicated no one, and only annoyed inconsequential persons like myself, who detest being set conundrums of which I do not know the answer by some one who obviously does. The practice is futile and vexatious.

The incriminating words came heavy-typed in the last paragraph of the leading article, and contained an unmistakable threat that the policy of abduction would continue until female suffrage had been secured.

After dinner that night I strolled round to the Club to hear what people were saying.

"They've done for themselves this time," Gartside told me with much assurance when I ran across him in the hall. "Don't ask me where I got it from, and don't let it go any further, but there's a warrant out against some one."

I was conscious of a very uncomfortable sensation of hollowness.

"Is it indiscreet to ask who?"

"I can't tell you, because I don't know. I fancy you proceed against the whole lot, printers included."

"They've not wasted much time," I said.

It was Tuesday night. The _New Militant_ went to press at midday and was on sale next morning throughout the country. In London, of course, it could be obtained overnight, and I had secured an early copy by calling at the office itself.

I stood in the middle of the hall wondering exactly what I could do to prevent the arm of the law stretching out and folding Chester Square in its embrace. I was still wondering when Paddy Culling bounded up the steps and seized Gartside and myself by either hand.