Mr.Gladstone had gone out for a few minutes.

Sir William Harcourt was in charge of the Bill, and he was replying to some argument of the Unionists opposite.
Sir William Harcourt has an excellent method of dealing with futile and dishonest amendments.

He declines to argue them in detail.

With that rich humour of which the public know less than his friends and intimates, Sir William airily dismisses the whole business, and with a laugh brings down shivering to the ground a whole fabric of laboriously constructed nonsense.

Well, Sir William was in the middle of a sentence in which he was speaking of the absurd suspicion of the Irish people which was entertained by the Tories--and Mr.Gladstone, entering from behind the Speaker's chair at that very moment, just caught that one phrase.