"I suppose he has begged of you?"
He brushed the question aside.
"Trevelle knows me better. You don't come to rich men unless you have a proposition. What are all these people to me? I didn't starve them, anyway. Why should I give them money?"
She thought him quite brutal, and went away presently to speak to some of "her guests," who had nearly fallen to blows on the far side of the hall. The heaps of bread were vanishing at an alarming rate, and the sea of faces beyond the doors of the building declared its tragedies of want and hope. In many a street in Stepney and Whitechapel that day the bakers had no bread to sell. Men told you that the government were at grips with the affair, but could any government compel men to work when they had the mind to be idle? A panic of threatened starvation drove the women to frenzy—the men to oaths. There is always hope in the meanest house; but there could be no hope if this frost endured and England were paralysed by strikes. So they fought for the gifts of the Temple, the strong triumphant, the weak to the wall.
"Guess you will have to lay on those tickets," Faber said to her when next she came round to his side of the room. She listened, now impressed by the reason of it.
"We could feed ten times the number," she said—"it is awful to turn them away!"
"Why not take your Temple across the road? I saw an empty factory as I came along; rent that, and see that each man and woman comes but once a day. Trevelle will do it for you."
She said that it must be done, and went away to speak to the unwearying aide-de-camp about it. Later on, with hardly another word to him, Faber saw her enter a plain hired carriage and drive off through the streets, followed by a howling mob whose moods were twain: gratitude on the part of some, rage and disappointment of others. She was going down to Leman Street to the children's institute there, Trevelle said; but he did not suggest that they should follow her.
"By the lord Harry! you've let me in for something!" he protested, mopping a perspiring face when Gabrielle had gone. Faber replied that he would let him in for a good deal more yet. "Anyway, you're a hero in her eyes," he said—and as he said it, he reflected once more upon the meaning of that quality to women, and how far he seemed, from its possession where they were concerned.