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Before the end of May the fruit of all this labour began to appear. Camptons were reconstructed, arbitration had been forced upon the Docks combination in the North just in time to prevent a wholesale transference of shipping abroad, and more important than all, perhaps, there had begun to crop up in the papers, here, there, and everywhere, the mention—and the flattering mention—of Van Diemens, and the wealthy were already familiar with the conception of a certain railway in the land which was under the Van Diemens charter.

The wealthy, but as yet only the wealthy; it is as fatal to be too early as to be too late, and that brain which knew how to drive and compel, had also known so well how to restrain, that the shares still remained unsaleable with the meaningless quotation of sixteen shillings and a few fluctuating pence still attached to them in the market lists.

So Repton stood in the middle of May, 1915, when he became aware that an obscure member (obscure at least in the House of Commons—and Repton noticed little of, and cared nothing for, the merely luxurious world of London), an aristocrat of sorts, one of the Demaine,—George Demaine it seemed, was being talked about. He was being pushed somehow. Repton hardly heeded so commonplace a phenomenon, save perhaps to wonder what job was on:—he continued to push Van Diemens.