"Hush! They might--" he glanced at the dining-room door.
"You thought I shouldn't 'do.' Julian--well, maybe you know what he thought. So I let him try to make up to me. He couldn't, but I let him try. And what's come out of it all is that Julian--"
"I've made him care! I've made him build on me! And can't you see"--she seemed to arraign Napier's own loyalty as she stood there under the hall light, vehement, unhappy--"can't you see Julian needs his friends now as he never did before?" In the little pause her excitement mounted. "And besides that, Julian's right about the war. And you are wrong. Oh, why _are_ you!" she cried out of the aching that comes of conflict between love of a person and hate of his creed.
They heard a taxi stop. She caught up her gloves. "Do you know what I kept thinking at dinner? It's what I always think when people talk like Sir William, about letting the war go on for Kitchener's three mortal years. I kept thinking that Julian won't ever come here again. And what a pity it was! Unless you--_do_ come and hear him, Gavan, with me! To-morrow afternoon. _Please!_"
"I'd do most things for you," he said; "not that."
And then he went and did it. At least, he went alone.
Had the authorities not believed that outside the narrow--so narrow as to be negligible--limits of the League for a Negotiated Peace, no general notice would be taken of so unpopular an enterprise, the open-air meeting would have been interdicted. The authorities had not reflected that unpopularity, if only it is great enough, is as sure a draw as its opposite.
Napier left the taxi and let himself be carried along in the human current to a place opposite that part of the improvised platform where a speaker stood facing the people. The thick-set figure of the ex-member of Parliament stood in a storm of booing, of derisive shouts and groans that ultimately drowned his appeal.
No sooner had they howled him down than a much younger man stood up there facing the crowd. Julian. He spoke for a good twenty minutes. His boyishness, and that something of moral passion that compelled you to listen to Julian, held the people quiet through the earlier minutes, and held them muttering and threatening up to the bursting of the storm.