A few days later, on a Saturday afternoon, the Colonel was sitting in the loggia of the hostel looking out over the sea when he saw two men coming down the shoulder of Beau-nez along the coast-guard path.

The tall man in black with flying coat-tails he recognised at once. It was Mr. Geddes, the one outstanding minister of the Gospel in Beachbourne: a scholar, yet in touch with his own times, eloquent and broad, with a more than local reputation as a Liberal leader. His companion was a sturdy fellow in a cap, with curly black hair and a merry eye.

The Colonel, who never missed a chance, went out to waylay the pair. Mr. Geddes introduced his friend—Mr. Burt, who\'d come down recently from Mather and Platt\'s in the North to act as foreman fitter at Hewson and Clarke\'s in the East-end.

The Colonel reached out a bony hand, which the other gripped fiercely.

"I know you\'re both conspirators," he said with a wary smile. "What troubles are you hatching for me now?"

Mr. Geddes laughed, and the engineer, surly a little from shyness and self-conscious as a school-boy, grinned.

"Mr. Burt and I are both keen on education," said the minister. "He\'s been telling me of Tawney\'s tutorial class at Rochdale. We\'re hatching a branch of the W.E.A. down here. That\'s our only conspiracy."

"What\'s the W.E.A.?" asked the Colonel, always keen.

"It\'s the Democratic wing of the National Service League," the engineer answered in broad Lancashire—"Workers\' Education Association."

The Colonel nodded.

"He\'s getting at me!" he said. "I\'m always being shot at. Will you both come in to tea and talk?—I should like you to meet my wife, Burt. She\'ll take you on. She\'s a red-hot Tory and a bonnie fighter."

But Mr. Geddes had a committee, and—"A must get on with the Revolution," said Burt gravely.

"What Revolution\'s that?" asked the Colonel.

"The Revolution that begun in 1906—and that\'s been going on ever since; and will go on till we\'re through!" He said the last words with a kind of ferocity; and then burst into a sudden jovial roar as he saw the humour of his own ultra-seriousness.

Mrs. Lewknor, who had been watching the interview from the loggia, called to her husband as he returned to the house.

"Who was that man with Mr. Geddes?" she asked.

"Stanley Bessemere\'s friend," the Colonel answered. "A red Revolutionary from Lancasheer—on the bubble; and a capital good fellow too, I should say."

That evening the Colonel rang up Mr. Geddes to ask about the engineer.

"He\'s the new type of intellectual artizan," the minister informed him. "The russet-coated captain who knows what he\'s fighting for and loves what he knows. Unless I\'m mistaken he\'s going to play a considerable part in our East-end politics down here." He gave the other the engineer\'s address, adding with characteristic breadth,

"It might be worth your while to follow him up perhaps, Colonel."

Joe Burt lodged in the East-end off Pevensey Road in the heart of the new and ever-growing industrial quarter of Seagate, which was gradually transforming a rather suburban little town of villas with a fishing-station attached into a manufacturing city, oppressed with all the thronging problems of our century. There the Colonel visited his new friend. Burt was the first man of his type the old soldier, who had done most of his service in India, had met. The engineer himself, and even more the room in which he lived, with its obvious air of culture, was an eye-opener to the Colonel.

There was an old sideboard, beautifully kept, and on it a copper kettle and spirit lamp; a good carpet, decent curtains. On the walls were Millais\'s Knight Errant, Greiffenhagen\'s Man with a Scythe, and Clausen\'s Girl at the Gate. But it was the books on a long deal plank that most amazed the old soldier; not so much the number of them but the quality. He stood in front of them and read their titles with grunts.

Alfred Marshall\'s Principles of Economics lolled up against the Webbs\' Industrial Democracy; Bradley\'s lectures on the tragedies of Shakespeare hobnobbed with Gilbert Murray\'s translations from Euripides. Few of the standard books on Economics and Industrial History, English or American, were missing. And the work of the modern creators in imaginative literature, Wells, Shaw, Arnold Bennett were mixed with Alton Locke, Daniel Deronda, Sybil, and the essays of Samuel Butler and Edward Carpenter.

"You\'re not married then?" said the Colonel, throwing a glance round the well-appointed room.

"Yes, A am though," the engineer answered, his black-brown eyes twinkling. "A\'m married to Democracy. She\'s ma first loov and like to be ma last."

"What you doing down South?" asked the Colonel, tossing one leg over the other as he sat down to smoke.

"Coom to make trouble," replied the other.

"Good for you!" said the Colonel. "Hotting things up for our friend Stan. Well, he wants it. All the politicians do."

His first visit to Seagate Lane was by no means his last: for the engineer\'s courage, his integrity, his aggressive tactics, delighted and amused the scholarly old soldier; but when he came to tackle his man seriously on the business of the National Service League he found he could not move him an inch from the position he invariably took up: The Army would be used by the Government in the only war that matters—the Industrial war; and therefore the Army must not be strengthened.

"If the Army was used for the only purpose it ought to be used for—defence—A\'d be with you. So\'d the boolk of the workers. But it\'s not. They use it to croosh strike............