Lady Tressady, for her part, thought, with indignant despair, that he had not behaved at all as an only son should—especially an only son just returned to a widowed mother after four years' absence. How could anyone suppose that in four years there would be no debts—on such a pittance of an income? Some money, indeed, he had promised her; but not nearly enough, and not immediately. He "must look into things at home." Lady Tressady was enraged with herself and him that she had not succeeded better in making him understand how pressing, how urgent, matters were.

She must, indeed, bring it home to him that there might be a scandal at any moment. That odious livery-stable man, two or three dressmakers—in these directions every phase and shift of the debtor's long finesse had been exhausted long ago. Even she was at her wits' end.

As for other matters—But from these her thoughts turned hurriedly away. Luck would change, of course, sometime; it must change! No need to say anything about that just yet, especially while George's temper was in such a queer state.

It was very odd—most annoying! As a baby even he had never been caressing or sweet like other people's babies. And now, really!—why her son should have such unattractive ways!

But, manoeuvre as she would, George would not be drawn into further discussion. She could only show him offended airs, and rack her brains morning and night as to how best to help herself.

Meanwhile George had never been so little pleased with living as during these few days. He was overwhelmed with congratulations; and, to judge from the newspapers, "all England," as Lady Tressady said, "was talking of him." It seemed to him ridiculous that a man should derive so little entertainment from such a fact. Nevertheless, his dulness remained, and refused to be got rid of. He discussed with himself, of course, for a new set of reasons, the possibility of evading the shooting-parties, and departing. But he was deeply pledged to stay; and he was under considerable obligations to the Wattons. So he stayed; but he shot so as to increase his own dissatisfaction with the universe, and to make the other men in the house wonder what might be the general value of an Indian sporting reputation when it came to dealing with the British pheasant.

Then he turned to business. He tried to read some Parliamentary reports bearing on a coming measure, and full of notes by Fontenoy, which Fontenoy had left with him. But it only ended in his putting them hastily aside, lest in the mood of obscure contradiction that possessed him he should destroy his opinions before he had taken his seat.

On the day before the last "shoot," among the letters his servant brought him in the early morning, was one that he tore open in a hurry, tossing the rest aside.

It was from Miss Sewell, requesting, prettily, in as few words as possible, that he would return her a book she had lent him.

"My mother," she wrote, "has almost recovered from her sudden attack of chill. I trust the shooting-parties have amused you, and that you have read all Lord Fontenoy's Blue Books."

George wrote a reply before he went down to breakfast—a piece of ordinary small-talk, that seemed to him the most wretched stuff conceivable. But he pulled two pens to pieces before he achieved it.

Then he went out for a long walk alone, pondering what was the matter with him. Had that little witch dropped the old familiar poison into his veins after all? Certainly some women made life vivacity and pleasure, while others—his mother or Mrs. Watton, for instance—made it fatigue or tedium.

Ever since his boyhood Tressady had been conscious of intermittent assaults of melancholy, fits of some inner disgust, which hung the world in black, crippled his will, made him hate himself and despise his neighbours. It was, possibly, some half-conscious dread lest this morbid speck in his nature should gain upon the rest that made him so hungry for travel and change of scene after he left college. It explained many surprises, many apparent ficklenesses in his life. During the three weeks that he had spent in the same house with Letty Sewell he had never once been conscious of this lurking element of his life. And now, after four days, he found himself positively pining for her voice, the rustle of her delicate dress, her defiant, provocative ways that kept a man on the alert—still more, her smiling silences that seemed to challenge all his powers, the touch of her small cool hand that crushed so easily in his.

What had she left the house for in that wilful way? He did not believe her excuses. Yet he was mystified. Did she realise that things were becoming serious, and did she not mean them to be serious? If so, who or what hindered?

As for Fontenoy—

Tressady quickened his step impatiently as he recalled that harassed and toiling figure. Politics or no politics, he would live his life! Besides, it was obviously to his profit to marry. How could he ever make a common household with his mother? He meant to do his duty by her, but she annoyed and abashed him twenty times a day. He would be far happier married, far better able to do his work. He was not passionately in love—not at all. But—for it was no good fencing with himself any longer—he desired Letty Sewell's companionship more than he had desired anything for a long time. He wanted the right to carry off the little musical box, with all its tunes, and set it playing in his own house, to keep him gay. Why not? He could house it prettily, and reward it well.

As for the rest, he decided, without thinking about it, that Letty Sewell was well born and bred. She had, of course, all the little refinements a fastidious taste might desire in a woman. She would never discredit a man in society. On the contrary, she would be a great strength to him there. And she must be sweet-tempered, or that pretty child Evelyn Watton would not be so fond of her.

That pretty child, meanwhile, was absorbed in the excitement of her own small role. Tressady, who had only made duty-conversation with her before, had found out somehow that she was sympathetic—that she would talk to him charmingly about Letty. After a very little pretending, he let himself go; and Evelyn dreamt at night of his confidences, her heart, without knowing it, leaping forward to the time when a man would look at her so, for her own sake—not another's. She forgot that she had ever criticised Letty, thought her vain or selfish. Nay, she made a heroine of her forthwith; she remembered all sorts of delightful things to say of her, simply that she might keep the young member talking in a corner, that she might still enjoy the delicious pride of feeling that she knew—she was helping it on.

After the big "shoot," for instance, when all the other gentlemen were stiff and sleepy, George spent the whole evening in chattering to Evelyn, or, rather, in making her chatter. Lady Tressady loitered near them once or twice. She heard the names "Letty," "Miss Sewell," passing and repassing—one talker catching up the other. Over any topic that included Miss Sewell they lingered; when anything was begun that did not concern her, it dropped at once, like a ball ill thrown. The mother went away smiling rather sourly.

She watched her son, indeed, cat-like all these days, trying to discover what had happened—what his real mind was. She did not wish for a daughter-in-law at all, and she had even a secret fear of Letty Sewell in that capacity. But somehow George must be managed, her own needs must be met. She felt that she might be undoing the future; but the present drove her on.

On the following morning, from one of Mrs. Watton's numerous letters there dropped out the fact that Letty Sewell was expected immediately at a country house in North Mercia whereof a certain Mrs. Corfield was mistress—a house only distant some twenty miles from the Tressadys' estate of Ferth Place.

"My sister-in-law has recovered with remarkable rapidity," said Mrs. Watton, raising a sarcastic eye. "Do you know anything of the Corfields, Sir George?"

"Nothing at all," said George. "One hears of them sometimes from neighbours. They are said to be very lively folk. Miss Sewell will have a gay time."

"Corfield?" said Lady Tressady, her head on one side and her cup balanced in two jewelled hands. "What! Aspasia Corfield! Why, my dear George—one of my oldest friends!"

George laughed—the short, grating laugh his mother so often evoked.

"Beg pardon, mother; I can only answer for myself. To the best of my belief I never saw her, either at Ferth or anywhere else."

"Why, Aspasia Corfield and I," said Lady Tressady with languid reflectiveness—"Aspasia Corfield and I copied each other's dresses, and bought our hats at the same place, when we were eighteen. I haven't seen her for an eternity. But Aspasia used to be a dear girl—and so fond of me!"

She put down her cup with a sigh, intended as a reproach to George. George only buried himself the deeper in his morning's letters.

Mrs. Watton, behind her newspaper, glanced grimly from the mother to the son.

"I wonder if that woman has a single real old friend in the world. How is George Tressady going to put up with her?"

The Wattons themselves had been on friendly terms with Tressady's father for many years. Since Sir William's death and George's absence, however, Mrs. Watton had not troubled herself much about Lady Tressady, in which she believed she was only following suit with the rest of West Mercia. But now that George had reappeared as a promising politician, his mother—till he married—had to be to some extent accepted along with him. Mrs. Watton accordingly had thought it her duty to invite her for the election, not without an active sense of martyrdom. "She always has bored me to tears since I first saw Sir William trailing her about," she would remark to Letty. "Where did he pick her up? The marvel is that she has kept respectable. She has never looked it. I always feel inclined to ask her at breakfast why she dresses for dinner twelve hours too soon!"

Very soon after the little conversation about the Corfields Lady Tressady withdrew to her room, sat thoughtful for a while, with her writing-block on her knee, then wrote a letter. She was perfectly aware of the fact that since George had come back to her she was likely to be welcome once more in many houses that for years had shown no particular desire to receive her. She took the situation very easily. It was seldom her way to be bitter. She was only determined to amuse herself, to enjoy her life in her own way. If people disapproved of her, she thought them fools, but it did not prevent her from trying to make it up with them next day, if she saw an opening and it seemed worth while.

"There!" she said to herself as she sealed the letter, and looked at it with admiration, "I really have a knack for doing those things. I should think Aspasia Corfield would ask him by return—me, too, if she has any decency, though she has dropped me for fifteen years. She has a tribe of daughters.—Why I should play Miss Sewell's game like this I don't know! Well, one must try something."

That same afternoon mother and son took their departure for Ferth Place.

George, who had only spent a few weeks at Ferth since his return from India, should have found plenty to do both indoors and out. The house struck him as singularly dingy and out of order. Changes were imperatively demanded in the garden and in the estate. His business as a colliery-owner was in a tangled and critical condition. And meanwhile Fontenoy plied him incessantly with a political correspondence which of itself made large demands upon intelligence and energy.

Nevertheless he shuffled out of everything, unless it were the correspondence with Fontenoy. As to the notion that all the languor could be due merely to an unsatisfied craving for Letty Sewell's society, when it presented itself he still fought with it. The Indian climate might have somehow affected him. An English winter is soon forgotten, and has to be re-learnt like a distasteful lesson.

About a week after their arrival at Ferth George was sitting at his solitary breakfast when his mother came floating into the room, preceded by a rattle of bangles, a flutter of streamers, and the barking of little dogs.

She held various newly opened letters, and, running up to him, she laid her hands on his shoulders.

"Now"—thought George to himself with annoyance, "she is going to be arch!"

"Oh! you silly boy!" she said, holding him, with her head on one side. "Who's been cross and nasty to his poor old mammy? Who wants cheering up a bit before he settles down to his horrid work? Who would take his mammy to a nice party at a nice house, if he were prettily asked—eh? who would?"

She pinched his cheek before he could escape.

"Well, mother, of course you will do what you like," said George, walking off to supply himself with ham. "I shall not leave home again, just yet."

Lady Tressady smiled.

"Well, anyhow, you can read Aspasia Corfield's letter," she said, holding it out to him. "You know, really, that house isn't bad. They took over the Dryburghs' chef, and Aspasia knows how to pick her people."

"Aspasia!" The tone of patronising intimacy! George blushed, if his mother did not.

Yet he took the letter. He read it, then put it down, and walked to the window to look at a crowd of birds that had been collecting round a plate of food he had just put out upon the snow.

"Well, will you go?" said his mother.

"If you particularly wish it," he said, after a pause, in an embarrassed voice.

Lady Tressady's dimples were in full play as she settled herself into her seat and began to gather a supply of provisions. But as he returned to his place, and she glanced at him, she saw that he was not in a mood to be bantered, and understood that he was not going to let her force his confidence, however shrewdly she might guess at his affairs. So she controlled herself, and began to chatter about the Corfields and their party. He responded, and by the end of breakfast they were on much better terms than they had been for some weeks.

That morning also he wrote a cheque for her immediate necessities, which made her—for the time—a happy woman; and she overwhelmed him with grateful tears and embraces, which he did his best to bear.

Early in December he and she became the Corfields' guests. They found a large party collected, and Letty Sewell happily established as the spoilt child of the house. At the first touch of her hand, the first glance of her eyes, George's cloud dispersed.

"Why did you run away?" George asked her on the first possible occasion.

Letty laughed, fenced with the question for four days, during which George was never dull for a single instant, and then capitulated. She allowed him to propose to her, and was graciously pleased to accept him.

The following week Tressady went down with Letty to her home at Helbeck. He found an invalid father, a remarkably foolish, inconsequent mother, and a younger sister, Elsie, on whom, as it seemed to him, the burdens of the house mainly rested.

The father, who was suffering from a slow but incurable disease, had the remains of much natural ability and acuteness. He was well content with Tressady as a son-in-law; though in the few interviews that Tressady was able to have with him on the question of settlements the young man took pains to state his money affairs as carefully and modestly as possible. Letty was not often in her father's room, and Mr. Sewell treated her, when she did come, rather like an agreeable guest than a daughter. But he was evidently extremely proud of her—as also was the mother—and he would talk much to George, when his health allowed it, of her good looks and her social success.

With the younger sister Tressady did not find it easy to make friends.

She was plain, sickly, and rather silent. She seemed to have scientific tastes and to be a great reader. And, so far as he could judge, the two sisters were not intimate.

"Don't hate me for taking her away!" he said, as he was bidding good-bye to Elsie, and glancing over her shoulder at Letty on the stairs.

The girl's quiet eyes were crossed by a momentary look of amusement. Then she controlled herself, and said gently:

"We didn't expect to keep her! Good-bye."



CHAPTER IV

"Oh, Tully, look at my cloak! You've let it fall! Hold my fan, please, and give me the opera-glasses."

The speaker was Miss Sewell. She and an elderly lady were sitting side by side in the stalls, about halfway down St. James's Hall. The occasion was a popular concert, and, as Joachim was to play, every seat in the hall was rapidly filling up.

Letty rose as she asked for the opera-glasses, and scanned the crowds streaming in through the side-doors.

"No—no signs of him! He must have been kept at the House, after all," she said, with annoyance. "Really, Tully, I do think you might have got a programme all this time! Why do you leave everything to me?"

"My dear!" said her companion, protesting, "you didn't tell me to."

"Well, I don't see why I should tell you everything. Of course I want a programme. Is that he? No! What a nuisance!"

"Sir George must have been detained," murmured her companion, timidly.

"What a very original thing to say, wasn't it, Tully?" remarked Miss Sewell, with sarcasm, as she sat down again.

The lady addressed was silent, instinctively waiting till Letty's nerves should have quieted down. She was a Miss Tulloch, a former governess of the Sewells, and now often employed by Letty, when she was in town, as a convenient chaperon. Letty was accustomed to stay with an aunt in Cavendish Square, an old lady who did not go out in the evenings. A chaperon therefore was indispensable, and Maria Tulloch could always be had. She existed somewhere in West Kensington, on an income of seventy pounds a year. Letty took her freely to the opera and the theatre, to concerts and galleries, and occasionally gave her a dress she did not want. Miss Tulloch clung to the connection as her only chance of relief from the boarding-house routine she detested, and was always abjectly ready to do as she was told. She saw nothing she was not meant to see, and she could be shaken off at a moment's notice. For the rest, she came of a stock of gentlefolk; and her invariable black dress, her bits of carefully treasured lace, the weak refinement of her face, and her timid manner did no discredit to the brilliant creature beside her.

When the first number of the programme was over, Letty got up once more, opera-glass in hand, to search among the late-comers for her missing lover. She nodded to many acquaintances, but George Tressady was not to be seen; and she sat down finally in no mood either to listen or to enjoy, though the magician of the evening was already at work.

"There's something very special, isn't there, you want to see Sir George about to-night?" Tully inquired humbly when the next pause occurred.

"Of course there is!" said Letty, crossly. "You do ask such foolish questions, Tully. If I don't see him to-night, he may let that house in Brook Street slip. There are several people after it—the agents told me."

"And he thinks it too expensive?"

"Only because of her. If she makes him pay her that preposterous allowance, of course it will be too expensive. But I don't mean him to pay it."

"Lady Tressady is terribly extravagant," murmured Miss Tulloch.

"Well, so long as she isn't extravagant with his money—our money—I don't care a rap," said Letty; "only she sha'n't spend all her own and all ours too, which is what she has been doing. When George was away he let her live at Ferth, and spend almost all the income, except five hundred a year that he kept for himself. And then she got so shamefully into debt that he doesn't know when he shall ever clear her. He gave her money at Christmas, and again, I am sure, just lately. Well! all I know is that it must be stopped. I don't know that I shall be able to do much till I'm married, but I mean to make him take this house."

"Is Lady Tressady nice to you? She is in town, isn't she?"

"Oh yes! she's in town. Nice?" said Letty, with a little laugh. "She can't bear me, of course; but we're quite civil."

"I thought she tried to bring it on?" said the confidante, anxious, above all things, to be sympathetic.

"Well, she brought him to the Corfields, and let me know she had. I don't know why she did it. I suppose she wanted to get something out of him. Ah! there he is!"

And Letty stood up, smiling and beckoning, while Tressady's tall thin figure made its way along the central passage.

"Horrid House! What made you so late?" she said, as he sat down between her and Miss Tulloch.

George Tressady looked at her with delight. The shrewish contractions in the face, which had been very evident to Tully a few minutes before, had all disappeared, and the sharp slight lines of it seemed to George the height of delicacy. At sight of him colour and eyes had brightened. Yet at the same time there was not a trace of the raw girl about her. She knew very well that he had no taste for ingenues, and she was neither nervous nor sentimental in his company.

"Do you suppose I should have stayed a second longer than I was obliged?" he asked her, smiling, pressing her little hand under pretence of taking her programme.

The first notes of a new Brahms quartette mounted, thin and sweet, into the air. The musical portion of the audience, having come for this particular morsel, prepared themselves eagerly for the tasting and trying of it. George and Letty tried to say a few things more to each other before yielding to the general silence, but an old gentleman in front turned upon them a face of such disdain and fury they must needs laugh and desist.

Not that George was unwilling. He was tired; and silence with Letty beside him was not only repose, but pleasure. Moreover, he derived a certain honest pleasure of a mixed sort from music. It suggested literary or pictorial ideas to him which stirred him, and gave him a sense of enjoyment. Now, as the playing flowed on, it called up delightful images in his brain: of woody places, of whirling forms, of quiet rivers, of thin trees Corot-like against the sky—scenes of pleading, of frolic, reproachful pain, dissolving joy. With it all mingled his own story, his own feeling; his pride of possession in this white creature touching him; his sense of youth, of opening life, of a crowded stage whereon his "cue" had just been given, his "call" sounded. He listened with eagerness, welcoming each fancy as it floated past, conscious of a grain of self-abandonment even—a rare mood with him. He was not absorbed in love by any means; the music spoke to him of a hundred other kindling or enchanting things. Nevertheless it made it doubly pleasant to be there, with Letty beside him. He was quite satisfied with himself and her; quite certain that he had done everything for the best. All this the music in some way emphasised—made clear.

When it was over, and the applause was subsiding, Letty said in his ear: "Have you settled about the house?"

He smiled down upon her, not hearing what she said, but admiring her dress, its little complication and subtleties, the violets that perfumed every movement, the slim fingers holding the fan. Her mere ways of personal adornment were to him like pleasant talk. They surprised and amused him—stood between him and ennui.

She repeated her question.

A frown crossed his brow, and the face changed wholly.

"Ah!—it is so difficult to see one's way," he said, with a little sigh of annoyance.

Letty played with her fan, and was silent.

"Do you so much prefer it to the others?" he asked her.

Letty looked up with astonishment.

"Why, it is a house!" she said, lifting her eyebrows; "and the others—"

"Hovels? Well, you are about right. The small London house is an abomination. Perhaps I can make them take less premium."

Letty shook her head.

"It is not at all a dear house," she said decidedly.

He still frowned, with the look of one recalled to an annoyance he had shaken off.

"Well, darling, if you wish it so much, that settles it. Promise to be still nice to me when we go through the Bankruptcy Court!"

"We will let lodgings, and I will do the waiting," said Letty, just laying her hand lightly against his for an instant. "Just think! That house would draw like anything. Of course, we will only take the eldest sons of peers. By the way, do you see Lord Fontenoy?"

They were in the middle of the "interval," and almost everyone about them, including Miss Tulloch, was standing up, talking or examining their neighbours.

George craned his neck round Miss Tulloch, and saw Fontenoy sitting beside a lady, on the other side of the middle gangway.

"Who is the lady?" Letty inquired. "I saw her with him the other night at the Foreign Office."

George smiled.

"That—if you want to know—is Fontenoy's story!"

"Oh, but tell me at once!" said Letty, imperiously. "But he hasn't got a story, or a heart. He's only stuffed with blue-book."

"So I thought till a few weeks ago. But I know a good deal more now about Master Fontenoy than I did."

"But who is she?"

"She is a Mrs. Allison. Isn't that white hair beautiful? And her face—half saint, I always think—you might take her for a mother-abbess—and half princess. Did you ever see such diamonds?"

George pulled his moustaches, and grinned as he looked across at Fontenoy.

"Tell me quick!" said Letty, tapping him on the arm—"Is she a widow?—and is he going to marry her? Why didn't you tell me before?—why didn't you tell me at Malford?"

"Because I didn't know," said George, laughing. "Oh! it's a strange story—too long to tell now. She is a widow, but he is not going to marry her, apparently. She has a grown-up son, who hasn't yet found himself a wife, and thinks it isn't fair to him. If Fontenoy wants to introduce her, don't refuse. She is the mistress of Castle Luton, and has delightful parties. Yes!—if I'd known at Malford what I know now!"

And he laughed again, remembering Fontenoy's nocturnal incursion upon him, and its apparent object. Who would have imagined that the preacher of that occasion had ever given one serious thought to woman and woman's arts—least of all that he was the creation and slave of a woman!

Letty's curiosity was piqued, and she would have plied George with questions, but that she suddenly perceived that Fontenoy had risen, and was coming across to them.

"Gracious!" she said; "here he comes. I can't think why; he doesn't like me."

Fontenoy, however, when he had made his way to them, greeted Miss Sewell with as much apparent cordiality as he showed to anyone else. He had received George's news of the marriage with all decorum, and had since sent a handsome wedding-present to the bride-elect. Letty, however, was never at ease with him, which, indeed, was the case with most women.

He stood beside the fiances for a minute or two, exchanging a few commonplaces with Letty on the performers and the audience; then he turned to George with a change of look.

"No need for us to go back to-night, I think?"

"What, to the House? Dear, no! Grooby and Havershon may be trusted to drone the evening out, I should hope, with no trouble to anybody but themselves. The Government are just keeping a house, that's all. Have you been grinding at your speech all day?"

Fontenoy shrugged his shoulders.

"I sha'n't get anything out that I want to say. Are you coming to the House on Friday, Miss Sewell?"

"Friday?" said Letty, looking puzzled.

George laughed.

"I told you. You must plead trousseau if you want to save yourself!"

Amusement shone in his blue eyes as they passed from Letty to Fontenoy. He had long ago discovered that Letty was incapable of any serious interest in his public life. It did not disturb him at all. But it tickled his sense of humour that Letty would have to talk politics all the same, and to talk them with people like Fontenoy.

"Oh! you mean your Resolution!" cried Letty. "Isn't it a Resolution? Yes, of course I'm coming. It's very absurd, for I don't know anything about it. But George says I must, and till I promise to obey, you see, I don't mind being obedient!"

Archness, however, was thrown away on Fontenoy. He stood beside her, awkward and irresponsive. Not being allowed to be womanish, she could only try once more to be political.

"It's to be a great attack on Mr. Dowson, isn't it?" she asked him. "You and George are mad about some things he has been doing? He's Home Secretary, isn't he? Yes, of course! And he's been driving trade away, and tyrannising over the manufacturers? I wish you'd explain it to me! I ask George, and he tells me not to talk shop."

"Oh, for goodness' sake," groaned George, "let it alone! I came to meet you and hear Joachim. However, I may as well warn you, Letty, that I sha'n't have time to be married once Fontenoy's anti-Maxwell campaign begins; and it will go on till the Day of Judgment."

"Why anti-Maxwell," said Letty, puzzled. "I thought it was Mr. Dowson you are going to attack?"

George, a little vexed that she should require it, began to explain that as Maxwell was "only a miserable peer," he could have nothing to do with the House of Commons, and that Dowson was the official mouthpiece of the Maxwell group and policy in the Lower House. "The hands were the hands of Esau," etc. Letty meanwhile, conscious that she was not showing to advantage, flushed, began to play nervously with her fan, and wished that George would leave off.

Fontenoy did nothing to assist George's political lesson. He stood impassive, till suddenly he tried to look across his immediate neighbours, and then said, turning to Letty:

"The Maxwells, I see, are here to-night." He nodded towards a group on the left, some two or three benches behind them. "Are you an admirer of Lady Maxwell's, Miss Sewell?—you've seen her, of course?"

"Oh yes, often!" said Letty, annoyed by the question, standing, however, eagerly on tiptoe. "I know her, too, a little; but she never remembers me. She was at the Foreign Office on Saturday, with such a hideous dress on—it spoilt her completely."

"Hideous!" said Fontenoy, with a puzzled look. "Some artist—I forget who—came and raved to me about it; said it was like some Florentine picture—I forget what—don't think I ever heard of it."

Letty looked contemptuous. Her expression said that in this matter, at any rate, she knew what she was talking about. Nevertheless her eyes followed the dark head Fontenoy had pointed out to her.

Lady Maxwell was at the moment the centre of a large group of people, mostly men, all of whom seemed to be eager to get a word with her, and she was talking with great animation, appealing from time to time to a tall, broad-shouldered gentleman, with greyish hair, who stood, smiling and silent, at the edge of the group. Letty noticed that many glasses from the balcony were directed to this particular knot of persons; that everybody near them, or rather every woman, was watching Lady Maxwell, or trying to get a better view of her. The girl felt a secret pang of envy and dislike.

The figure of a well-known accompanist appeared suddenly at the head of the staircase leading from the artists' room. The interval was over, and the audience began to subside into attention.

Fontenoy bowed and took his leave.

"You see, he didn't introduce me," said Letty, not without chagrin, as she settled down. "And how plain he is! I think him uglier every time I see him."

George made a vague sound of assent, but did not really agree with her in the least. Fontenoy's air of overwork was more decided than ever; his eyes had almost sunk out of sight; the complexion of his broad strong face had reddened and coarsened from lack of exercise and sleep; his brown hair was thinning and grizzling fast. Nevertheless a man saw much to admire in the ungainly head and long-limbed frame, and did not think any the better of a woman's intelligence for failing to perceive it.

After the concert, as George and Letty stood together in the crowded vestibule, he said to her, with a smile:

"So I take that house?"

"If you want to do anything disagreeable," she retorted, quickly, "don't ask me. Do it, and then wait till I am good-tempered again!"

"What a tempting prospect! Do you know that when you put on that particular hood that I would take Buckingham Palace to please you? Do you know also that my mother will think us very extravagant?"

"Ah, we can't all be economical!" said Letty.

He saw the little toss of the head and sharpening of the lips. They only amused him. Though he had never, so far, discussed his mother and her affairs with Letty in any detail, he understood perfectly well that her feeling about this particular house in some way concerned his mother, and that Letty and Lady Tressady were rapidly coming to dislike each other. Well, why should Letty pretend? He liked her the better for not pretending.

There was a movement in the crowd about them, and Letty, looking up, suddenly found herself close to a tall lady, whose dark eyes were bent upon her.

"How do you do, Miss Sewell?"

Letty, a little fluttered, gave her hand and replied. Lady Maxwell glanced across her at the tall young man, with the fair, irregular face. George bowed involuntarily, and she slightly responded. Then she was swept on by her own party.

"Have you sent for your carriage?" George heard someone say to her.

"No; I am going home in a hansom. I've tired out both the horses to-day. Aldous is going down to the club to see if he can hear anything about Devizes."

"Oh! the election?"

She nodded, then caught sight of her husband at the door beckoning, and hurried on.

"What a head!" said George, looking after her with admiration.

"Yes," said Letty, unwillingly. "It's the hair that's so splendid, the long black waves of it. How ridiculous to talk of tiring out her horses—that's just like her! As though she mightn't have fifty horses if she liked! Oh, George, there's our man! Quick, Tully!"

They made their way out. In the press George put his arm half round Letty, shielding her. The touch of her light form, the nearness of her delicate face, enchanted him. When their carriage had rolled away, and he turned homewards along Piccadilly, he walked absently for a time, conscious only of pulsing pleasure.

It was a mild February night. After a long frost, and a grudging thaw, westerly winds were setting in, and Spring could be foreseen. It had been pouring with rain during the concert, but was now fair, the rushing clouds leaving behind them, as they passed, great torn spaces of blue, where the stars shone.

Gusts of warm moist air swept through the street. As George's moment of intoxication gradually subsided, he felt the physical charm of the soft buffeting wind. How good seemed all living!—youth and capacity—this roaring multitudinous London—the future with its chances! This common pleasant chance of marriage amongst them—he was glad he had put out his hand to it. His wife that was to be was no saint and no philosopher. He thanked the fates! He at least asked for neither—on the hearth. "Praise, blame, love, kisses"—for all of those, life with Letty would give scope; yet for none of them in excess. There would be plenty of room left for other things, other passions—the passion of political power, for instance, the art of dealing with and commanding other men. He, the novice, the beginner, to talk of "commanding!" Yet already he felt his foot upon the ladder. Fontenoy consulted him, and confided in him more and more. In spite of his engagement, he was informing himself rapidly on a hundred questions, and the mental wrestle of every day was exhilarating. Their small group in the House, compact, tireless, audacious, was growing in importance and in the attention it extorted from the public. Never had the whole tribe of factory inspectors shown a more hawk-like, a more inquisitorial, a more intolerable vigilance than during the past twelve months. All the persons concerned with matches and white-lead, with certain chemical or metal-working industries, with "season" dressmaking or tailoring, were up in arms, rallying to Fontenoy's support with loud wrath and lamentations, claiming to speak not only for themselves, but for their "hands," in the angry protest that things had gone and were going a great deal too far, that trade was simply being harassed out of the country. A Whiggish group of manufacturers on the Liberal side were all with Fontenoy; while the Socialists, on whom the Government should have been able in such a matter to count to the death, had a special grievance against the Cabinet at the moment, and were sulking in their tents. The attack and defence would probably take two nights; for the Government, admitting the gravity of the assault, had agreed, in case the debate should not be concluded on Friday, to give up Monday to it. Altogether the affair would make a noise. George would probably get in his maiden speech on the second night, and was, in truth, devoting a great deal of his mind to the prospect; though to Letty he had persistently laughed at it and belittled it, refusing altogether to let her come and hear him.

Then, after Easter would come Maxwell's Bill, and the fat in the fire! Poor little Letty!—she would get but few of the bridal observances due to her when that struggle began. But first would come Easter and their wedding; that one short fortnight, when he would carry her off—soft, willing prey!—to the country, draw a "wind-warm space" about himself and her, and minister to all her whims.

He turned down St. James's Street, passed Marlborough House, and entered the Mall, on the way to Warwick Square, where he was living with his mother.

Suddenly he became aware of a crowd, immediately in front of him, in the direction of Buckingham Palace. A hansom and horse were standing in the roadway; the driver, crimson and hatless, was bandying words with one of the policemen, who had his notebook open, and from the middle of the crowd came a sound of wailing.

He walked up to the edge of the circle.

"Anybody hurt?" he said to the policeman, as the man shut his notebook.

"Little girl run over, sir."

"Can I be of any assistance? Is there an ambulance coming?"

"No, sir. There was a lady in the hansom. She's just now bandaging the child's leg, and says she'll take it to the hospital."

George mounted on one of the seats under the trees that stood handy, and looked over the heads of the crowd to the space in the centre which the other policeman was keeping clear. A little girl lay on the ground, or rather on a heap of coats; another girl, apparently about sixteen, stood near her, crying bitterly, and a lady—

"Goodness!" said Tressady; and, jumping down, he touched the policeman on the shoulder.

"Can you get me through? I think I could be some help. That lady"—he spoke a word in the policeman's ear.

The man touched his hat.

"Stand back, please!" he said, addressing the crowd, "and let this gentleman through."

The crowd divided unwillingly. But at the same moment it parted from the inside, and a little procession came through, both policemen joining their energies to make a free passage for it. In front walked the policeman carrying the little girl, a child apparently of about twelve years old. Her right foot lay stiffly across his arm, held straight and still in an impromptu splint of umbrellas and handkerchiefs. Immediately behind came the lady whom George had caught sight of, holding the other girl's hand in hers. She was bareheaded and in evening dress. Her opera-cloak, with its heavy sable collar, showed beneath it a dress of some light-coloured satin, which had already suffered deplorably from the puddles of the road, and, as she neared the lamp beneath which the cab had stopped, the diamonds on her wrists sparkled in the light. During her passage through the crowd, George perceived that one or two people recognised her, and that a murmur ran from mouth to mouth.

Of anything of the sort she herself was totally unconscious. George saw at once that she, not the policeman, was in command. She gave him directions, as they approached the cab, in a quick, imperative voice which left no room for hesitation.

"The driver is drunk," he heard her say; "who will drive?"

"One of us will drive, ma'am."

"What—the other man? Ask him to take the reins at once, please, before I get in. The horse is fresh, and might start. That's right. Now, when I say the word, give me the child."

She settled herself in the cab. George saw the policeman somewhat embarrassed, for a moment, with his burden. He came forward to his help, and between them they handed in the child, placing her carefully on her protector's knee.

Then, standing at the open door of the cab, George raised his hat. "Can I be of any further assistance to you, Lady Maxwell? I saw you just now at the concert."

She turned in some astonishment as she heard her name, and looked at the speaker. Then, very quickly, she seemed to understand.

"I don't know," she said, pondering. "Yes! you could help me. I am going to take the child to hospital. But there is this other girl. Could you take her home—she is very much upset? No!—first, could you bring her after me to St. George's? She wants to see where we put her sister."

"I will call another cab, and be there as soon as you."

"Thank you. Just let me speak to the sister a moment, please."

He put the weeping girl forward, and Lady Maxwell bent across the burden on her knee to say a few words to her—soft, quick words in another voice. The girl understood, her face cleared a little, and she let Tressady take charge of her.

One of the policemen mounted the box of the hansom, amid the "chaff" of the crowd, and the cab started. A few hats were raised in George's neighbourhood, and there was something of a cheer.

"I tell yer," said a voice, "I knowed her fust sight—seed her picture lots o' times in the papers, and in the winders too. My word, ain't she good-lookin! And did yer see all them diamonds?"

"Come along!" said George, impatiently, hurrying his charge into the four-wheeler the other policeman had just stopped for them.

In a few more seconds he, the girl, and the policeman were pursuing Lady Maxwell's hansom at the best speed of an indifferent horse. George tried to say a few consoling things to his neighbour; and the girl, reassured by his kind manner, found her tongue, and began to chatter in a tearful voice about the how and when of the accident: about the elder sister in a lodging in Crawford Street, Tottenham Court Road, whom she and the little one had been visiting; the grandmother in Westminster with whom they lived; poor Lizzie's place in a laundry, which now she must lose; how the lady had begged handkerchiefs and umbrellas from the crowd to tie up Lizzie's leg with—and so on through a number of other details incoherent or plaintive.

George heard her absently. His mind all the time was absorbed in the dramatic or ironic aspects of what he had just seen. For dramatic they were—though perhaps a little cheap. Could he, could anyone, have made acquaintance with this particular woman in more characteristic fashion? He laughed to think how he would tell the story to Fontenoy. The beautiful creature in her diamonds, kneeling on her satin dress in the mud, to bind up a little laundrymaid's leg—it was so extravagantly in keeping with Marcella Maxwell that it amused one like an overdone coincidence in a clumsy play.

What made her so beautiful? The face had marked defects; but in colour, expression, subtlety of line incomparable! On the other hand, the manner—no!—he shrugged his shoulders. The remembrance of its mannish—or should it be, rather, boyish?—energy and assurance somehow set him on edge.

In the end, they were not much behind the hansom; for the hospital porter was only just in the act of taking the injured child from Lady Maxwell as Tressady dismounted and went forward again to see what he could do.

But, somewhat to his chagrin, he was not wanted. Lady Maxwell and the porter did everything. As they went into the hospital, George caught a few of the things she was saying to the porter as she supported the child's leg. She spoke in a rapid, professional way, and the man answered, as the policeman had done, with a deference and understanding which were clearly not due only to her "grand air" and her evening dress. George was puzzled.

He and the elder sister followed her into the waiting-room. The house-surgeon and a nurse were summoned, and the injured leg was put into a splint there and then. The patient moaned and cried most of the time, and Tressady had hard work to keep the sister quiet. Then nurse and doctor lifted the child.

"They are going to put her to bed," said Lady Maxwell, turning to George. "I am going up with them. Would you kindly wait? The sister"—she dropped her business tone, and, smiling, touched the elder girl on the arm—"can come up when the little one is undressed."

The little procession swept away, and George was left with his charge. As soon as the small sister was out of sight, the elder one began to chatter again out of sheer excitement, crying at intervals. George did not heed her much. He walked up and down, with his hands in his pockets, conscious of a curious irritability. He did not think a woman should take a strange man's service quite so coolly.

At the end of another quarter of an hour a nurse appeared to summon the sister. Tressady was told he might come too if he would, and his charge threw him a quick, timid look, as though asking him not to desert her in this unknown and formidable place. So they followed the nurse up white stone stairs, and through half-lit corridors, where all was silent, save that once a sound of delirious shrieking and talking reached them through a closed door, and made the sister's consumptive little face turn whiter still.

At last the nurse, putting her finger on her lip, turned a handle, and George was conscious of a sudden feeling of pleasure.

They were standing on the threshold of a children's ward. On either hand was a range of beds, bluish-white between the yellow picture-covered walls and the middle-way of spotless floor. Far away, at the other end, a great fire glowed. On a bare table in the centre, laden with bottles and various surgical necessaries, stood a shaded lamp, and beside it the chair where the night-nurse had been sitting. In the beds were sleeping children of various ages, some burrowing, face downward, animal-like, into their pillows; others lying on their backs, painfully straight and still. The air was warm, yet light, and there was the inevitable smell of antiseptics. Something in the fire-lit space and comfort of the great room, its ordered lines and colours, the gentleness of the shaded light as contrasted with the dim figures in the beds, seemed to make a poem of it—a poem of human tenderness.

Two or three beds away to the right, Lady Maxwell was standing with the night-nurse of the ward. The little girl had been undressed, and was lying quiet, with a drawn, piteous face that turned eagerly as her sister came in. The whole scene was new and touching to Tressady. Yet, after the first impression, his attention was perforce held by Lady Maxwell, and he saw the rest only in relation to her. She had slipped off her heavy cloak, in order, perhaps, that she might help in the undressing of the child. Beneath, she wore a little shawl or cape of some delicate lace over her low dress. The dress itself was of a pale shade of green; the mire and mud with which it was bedabbled no longer showed in the half light; and the satin folds glistened dimly as she moved. The poetic dignity of the head, so finely wreathed with its black hair, of the full throat and falling shoulders, received a sort of special emphasis from the wide spaces, the pale colours and level lines of the ward. Tressady was conscious again of the dramatic significant note as he watched her, yet without any softening of his nascent feeling of antagonism.

She turned and beckoned to the sister as they entered:

"Come and see how comfortable she is! And then you must give this lady your name and address."

The girl timidly approached. Whilst she was occupied with her sister and with the nurse, Lady Maxwell suddenly looked round, and saw Tressady standing by the table a yard or two from her.

A momentary expression of astonishment crossed her face. He saw that, in her absorption with the case and the two sisters, she had clean forgotten all about him. But in a flash she remembered, and smiled.

"So you are really going to take her home? That is very kind of you. It will make all the difference to the grandmother that somebody should go and explain. You see, they leave her in the splint for the night, and to-morrow they will put the leg in plaster. Probably they won't keep her in hospital more than about three weeks, for they are very full."

"You seem to know all about it!"

"I was a nurse myself once, for a time," she said, but with a certain stiffness which seemed to mark the transition from the professional to the great lady.

"Ah! I should have remembered that. I had heard it from Edward Watton."

She looked up quickly. He felt that for the first time she took notice of him as an individual.

"You know Mr. Watton? I think you are Sir George Tressady, are you not? You got in for Market Malford in November? I recollect. I didn't like your speeches."

She laughed. So did he.

"Yes, I got in just in time for a fighting session."

Her laugh disappeared.

"An odious fight!" she said gravely.

"I am not so sure. That depends on whether you like fighting, and how certain you are of your cause!"

She hesitated a moment; then she said:

"How can Lord Fontenoy be certain of his cause!"

The slight note of scorn roused him.

"Isn't that what all parties say of their opponents?"

She glanced at him again, curiously. He was evidently quite young—younger than herself, she guessed. But his careless ease and experience of bearing, contrasted with his thin boy's figure, attracted her. Her lip softened reluctantly into a smile.

"Perhaps," she said. "Only sometimes, you know, it must be true! Well, evidently we can't discuss it here at one o'clock in the morning—and there is the nurse making signs to me. It is really very good of you. If you are in our neighbourhood on Sunday, will you report?"

"Certainly—with the greatest pleasure. I will come and give you a full account of my mission."

She held out a slim hand. The sister, red-eyed with crying, was handed over to him, and he and she were soon in a cab, speeding towards the Westminster mews whither she directed him.

Well, was Maxwell to be so greatly envied? Tressady was not sure. Such a woman, he thought, for all her beauty, would not have greatly stirred his own pulses.



CHAPTER V

The week which had opened thus for Tressady promised to be one of lively interest for such persons as were either concerned in or took notice of the House of Commons and its doings. Fontenoy's onslaught upon the administration of the Home Office, and, through the Home Secretary, on the Maxwell group and influence, had been long expected, and was known to have been ably prepared. Its possible results were already keenly discussed. Even if it were a damaging attack, it was not supposed that it could have any immediate effect on the state of parties or the strength of the Government. But after Easter Maxwell's factory Bill—a special Factory Act for East London, touching the grown man for the first time, and absolutely prohibiting home-work in certain specified industries—was to be brought forward, and could not fail to provide Maxwell's adversaries with many chances of red and glorious battle. It was disputable from end to end; it had already broken up one Government; it was strongly pressed and fiercely opposed; and on the fate of each clause in Committee might hang the life or death of the Ministry—not so much because of the intrinsic importance of the matter, as because Maxwell was indispensable to the Cabinet, and it was known that neither Maxwell nor his close friend and henchman, Dowson, the Home Secretary, would accept defeat on any of the really vital points of the Bill.

The general situation was a curious one. Some two years before this time a strong and long-lived Tory Government had come to an end. Since then all had been confusion in English politics. A weak Liberal Government, undermined by Socialist rebellion, had lasted but a short time, to be followed by an equally precarious Tory Ministry, in which Lord Maxwell—after an absence from politics of some four years or so—returned to his party, only to break it up. For he succeeded in imposing upon them a measure in which his own deepest convictions and feelings were concerned, and which had behind it the support of all the more important trade unions. Upon that measure the Ministry fell; but during their short administration Maxwell had made so great an impression upon his own side that when they returned, as they did return, with an enlarged majority, the Maxwell Bill retained one of the foremost places in their programme, and might be said, indeed, at the present moment to hold the centre of the political field.

That field, in the eyes of any middle-aged observer, was in strange disarray. The old Liberal party had been almost swept away; only a few waifs and strays remained, the exponents of a programme that nobody wanted, and of cries that stirred nobody's blood. A large Independent Labour and Socialist party filled the empty benches of the Liberals—a revolutionary, enthusiastic crew, of whom the country was a little frightened, and who were, if the truth were known, a little frightened at themselves. They had a coherent programme, and represented a formidable "domination" in English life. And that English life itself, in all that concerned the advance and transformation of labour, was in a singularly tossed and troubled state. After a long period of stagnation and comparative industrial peace, storms at home, answering to storms on the Continent, had been let loose, and forces both of reaction and of revolution were making themselves felt in new forms and under the command of new masters.

At the head of the party of reaction stood Fontenoy. Some four years before the present session the circumstances of a great strike in the Midlands—together, no doubt, with some other influence—had first drawn him into public life, had cut him off from racing and all his natural pleasures. The strike affected his father's vast domain in North Mercia; it was marked by an unusual violence on the part of the men and their leaders; and Fontenoy, driven, sorely against his will, to take a part by the fact that his father, the hard and competent administrator of an enormous fortune, happened at the moment to be struck down by illness, found himself before many weeks were over taking it with passion, and emerged from the struggle a changed man. Property must be upheld; low-born disorder and greed must be put down. He sold his race-horses, and proceeded forthwith to throw into the formation of a new party all the doggedness, the astuteness, and the audacity he had been accustomed to lavish upon the intrigues and the triumphs of the Turf.

And now in this new Parliament his immense labour was beginning to tell. The men who followed him had grown in number and improved in quality. They abhorred equally a temporising conservatism and a plundering democracy. They stood frankly for birth and wealth, the Church and the expert. They were the apostles of resistance and negation; they were sworn to oppose any further meddling with trade and the personal liberty of master and workman, and to undo, if they could, some of the meddling that had been already carried through. A certain academic quality prevailed among them, which made them peculiarly sensitive to the absurdities of men who had not been to Oxford or Cambridge; while some, like Tressady, had been travellers, and wore an Imperialist heart upon their sleeve. The group possessed an unusual share of debating and oratorical ability, and they had never attracted so much attention as now that they were about to make the Maxwell Bill their prey.

Meanwhile, for the initiated, the situation possessed one or two points of special interest. Lady Maxwell, indeed, was by this time scarcely less of a political force than her husband. Was her position an illustration of some new power in women's hands, or was it merely an example of something as well known to the Pharaohs as to the nineteenth century—the ability of any woman with a certain physique to get her way? That this particular woman's way happened to be also her husband's way made the case less interesting for some observers. On the other hand, her obvious wifely devotion attracted simple souls to whom the meddling of women in politics would have been nothing but repellent had it not been recommended to them by the facts that Marcella Maxwell was held to be good as well as beautiful; that she loved her husband; and was the excellent mother of a fine son.

Of her devotion, in the case of this particular Bill, there was neither concealment nor doubt. She was known to have given her husband every assistance in the final drafting of the measure: she had seen for herself the working of every trade that it affected; she had innumerable friends among wage-earners of all sorts, to whom she gave half her social life; and both among them and in the drawing-rooms of the rich she fought her husband's cause unceasingly, by the help of beauty, wits, and something else—a broad impulsiveness and charm—which might be vilified or scorned, but could hardly be matched, by the enemy.

Meanwhile Lord Maxwell was a comparatively ineffective speaker, and passed in social life for a reserved and difficult personality. His friends put no one else beside him; and his colleagues in the Cabinet were well aware that he represented the keystone in their arch. But the man in the street, whether of the aristocratic or plebeian sort, knew comparatively little about him. All of which, combined with the special knowledge of an inner circle, helped still more to concentrate public attention on the convictions, the temperament, and the beauty of his wife.

Amid a situation charged with these personal or dramatic elements the Friday so keenly awaited by Fontenoy and his party arrived.

Immediately after question-time Fontenoy made his speech. In reply, the Home Secretary, suave, statistical, and conciliatory, poured a stream of facts and reports upon the House. The more repulsive they were, the softer and more mincing grew his voice in dealing with them. Fontenoy had excited his audience, Dowson succeeded in making it shudder. Nevertheless, the effect of the evening lay with Fontenoy.

George stayed to hear the official defence to its end. Then he hurried upstairs in search of Letty, who, with Miss Tulloch, was in the Speaker's private gallery. As he went he thought of Fontenoy's speech, its halting opening, the savage force of its peroration. His pulses tingled: "Magnificent!" he said to himself; "magnificent! We have found a man!"

Letty was eagerly waiting for him, and they walked down the corridor together. "Well?" he said, thrusting his hands deep into his pockets, and looking down upon her with a smile. "Well?"

Letty saw that she was expected to praise, and she did her best, his smile still bent upon her. He was perfectly aware all the time of the fatuity of what she was saying. She had caught up since her engagement a certain number of political phrases, and it amused him to note the cheap and tinkling use she made of them. Nevertheless she was chatting, smiling, gesticulating, for his pleasure. She was posing for him, using her grey eyes in these expressive ways, all for him. He thought her the most entertaining plaything; though it did occur to him sometimes that when they were married he would give her instruction.

"Ah, well, you liked it—that's good!" he said at last, interrupting her. "We've begun well, any way. It'll be rather hard, though, to have to speak after that on Monday!"

"As if you need be afraid! You're not, you know—it's only mock modesty. Do you know that Lady Maxwell was sitting two from me?"

"No! Well, how did she like Fontenoy?"

"She never moved after he got up. She pressed her face against that horrid grating, and stared at him all the time. I thought she was very flushed—but that may have been the heat—and in a very bad temper," added Letty, maliciously. "I talked to her a little about your adventure."

"Did she remember my existence?"

"Oh dear, yes! She said she expected you on Sunday. She never asked me to come." Letty looked arch. "But then one doesn't expect her to have pretty manners. People say she is shy. But, of course, that is only your friends' way of saying that you're rude."

"She wasn't rude to you?" said George, outwardly eager, inwardly sceptical. "Shall I not go on Sunday?"

"But of course you must go. We shall have to know them. She's not a woman's woman—that's all. Now, are we going to get some dinner, for Tully and I are famishing?"

"Come along, then, and I'll collect the party."

George had asked a few of his acquaintance in the House to meet his betrothed, together with an old General Tressady and his wife who were his distant cousins. The party were to assemble in the room of an under-secretary much given to such hospitable functions; and thither accordingly George led the way.

The room, when they reached it, was already fairly full of people, and alive with talk.

"Another party!" said George, looking round him. "Benson is great at this sort of thing."

"Do you see Lady Maxwell?" said Letty, in his ear.

George looked to his right, and perceived the lady in question. She also recognised him at once, and bowed, but without rising. She was the centre of a group of people, who were gathered round her and the small table on which she was leaning, and they were so deeply absorbed in the conversation that had been going on that they hardly noticed the entrance of Tressady and his companion.

"Leven has a party, you see," said the under-secretary. "Blaythwaite was to have taken them in—couldn't at the last moment; so they had to come in here. This is your side of the room! But none of your guests have come yet. Dinner at the House in the winter is a poor sort of business, Miss Sewell. We want the Terrace for these occasions."

He led the young girl to a sofa at the further end of the room, and made himself agreeable, to him the easiest process in the world. He was a fashionable and charming person, in the most irreproachable of frock-coats, and Letty was soon at her ease with him, and mistress of all her usual arts and graces.

"You know Lady Maxwell?" he said to her, with a slight motion of the head towards the distant group.

Letty replied; and while she and her companion chattered, George, who was standing behind them, watched the other party.

They were apparently in the thick of an argument, and Lady Maxwell, whose hands were lightly clasped on the table in front of her, was leaning forward with the look of one who had just shot her bolt, and was waiting to see how it would strike.

It struck apparently in the direction of her vis-a-vis, Sir Frank Leven, for he bent over to her, making a quick reply in a half-petulant boy's voice. He had been three years in the House, but had still the air of an Eton "swell" in his last half.

Lady Maxwell listened to what he had to say, a sort of silent passion in her face all the time—a noble passion nobly restrained.

When he stopped, George caught her reply.

"He has neither seen nor felt—every sentence showed it—that is all one can say. How can one take his judgment?"

George's mouth twitched. He slipped, smiling, into a place beside Letty. "Did you hear that?" he inquired.

"Fontenoy's speech, of course," said the under-secretary, looking round. "She's pitching into Leven, I suppose. He's as cranky and unsound as he can be. Shouldn't wonder if you got him before long."

He nodded good-temperedly to Tressady, then got up to speak to a man on the edge of the further group.

"How amusing!" said George, his satirical eyes still watching Lady Maxwell. "How much that set has 'seen and felt' of sweaters, and white-lead workers, and that ilk! Don't they look like it?"

"Who are they?"

Letty was now using all her eyes to find out, and especially for the purpose of carrying away a mental photograph of Lady Maxwell's black hat and dress.

"Oh! the Maxwells' particular friends in the House—most of them as well provided with family and goods as they make 'em: a philanthropic, idealist lot, that yearns for the people, and will be the first to be kicked downstairs when the people gets its own. However, they aren't all quite happy in their minds. Frank Leven there, as Benson says, is decidedly shaky. He is the member for the Maxwells' division—Maxwell, of course, put him in. He has a house there, I believe, and he married Lady Maxwell's great friend, Miss Macdonald—an ambitious little party, they say, who simply insisted on his going into Parliament. Oh, then, Bennett is there—do you see?—the little dark man with a frock-coat and spectacles? He's Lady Maxwell's link with the Independents—oldest workman member—been in the House a long time, so that by now he isn't quite as one-eyed and one-eared as the rest of them. I suppose she hopes to make use of him at critical moments—she takes care to have tools of all sorts. Gracious—listen!"

There was, indeed, a very storm of discussion sweeping through the rival party. Lady Maxwell's penetrating but not loud voice seemed to pervade it, and her eyes and face, as she glanced from one speaker to another, drew alternately the shafts and the sympathy of the rest.

Tressady made a face.

"I say, Letty, promise me one thing!" His hand stole towards hers. Tully discreetly looked the other way. "Promise me not to be a political woman, there's a dear!"

Letty hastily withdrew her fingers, having no mind at all for caresses in public.

"But I must be a political woman—I shall have to be! I know heaps of girls and married women who get up everything in the papers—all the stupidest things—not because they know anything about it, or because they care a rap, but because some of their men friends happen to be members; and when they come to see you, you must know what to talk to them about."

"Must you?" said George, "How odd! As though one went to tea with a woman for the sake of talking about the very same things you have been doing all day, and are probably sick to death of already."

"Never mind," said Letty, with her little air of sharp wisdom. "I know they do it, and I shall have to do it too. I shall pick it up."

"Will you? Of course you will! Only, when I've got a big Bill on, let me do a little of it for myself—give me some of the credit!"

Letty laughed maliciously.

"I don't know why you've taken such a dislike to her," she said, but in rather a contented tone, as her eye once more travelled across to Lady Maxwell. "Does she trample on her husband, after all?"

Tressady gave an impatient shrug.

"Trample on him? Goodness, no! That's all part of the play, too—wifely affection and the rest of it. Why can't she keep out of sight a little? We don't want the women meddling."

"Thank you, my domestic tyrant!" said Letty, making him a little bow.

"How much tyranny will you want before you accept those sentiments?" he asked her, smiling tenderly into her eyes. Both had a moment's pleasant thrill; then George sprang up.

"Ah, here they are at last!—the General, and all the lot. Now, I hope, we shall get some dinner."

Tressady had, of course, to introduce his elderly cousins and his three or four political friends to his future wife; and, amid the small flutter of the performance, the break-up and disappearance of the rival party passed unnoticed. When Tressady's guests entered the dining-room which looks on the terrace, and made their way to the top table reserved for them, the Leven dinner, near the door, was already half through.

George's little banquet passed merrily enough. The grey-haired General and his wife turned out to be agreeable and well-bred people, quite able to repay George's hospitality by the dropping of little compliments on the subject of Letty into his half-yielded ear. For his way of taking such things was always a trifle cynical. He believed that people say habitually twice what they mean, whether in praise or blame; and he did not feel that his own view of Letty was much affected by what other people thought of her.

So, at least, he would have said. In reality, he got a good deal of pleasure out of his fiancee's success. Letty, indeed, was enjoying herself greatly. This political world, as she had expected, satisfied her instinct for social importance better than any world she had yet known. She was determined to get on in it; nor, apparently, was there likely to be any difficulty in the matter. George's friends thought her a pretty, lively creature, and showed the usual inclination of the male sex to linger in her society. She mostly wanted to be informed as to the House and its ways. It was all so new to her!—she said. But her ignorance was not insipid; her questions had flavour. There was much talk and laughter; Letty felt herself the mistress of the table, and her social ambitions swelled within her.

Suddenly George's attention was recalled to the Maxwell table by the break-up of the group around it. He saw Lady Maxwell rise and look round her as though in search of someone. Her eyes fell upon him, and he involuntarily rose at the same instant to meet the step she made towards him.

"I must say another word of thanks to you"—she held out her hand. "That girl and her grandmother were most grateful to you."

"Ah, well!—I must come and make my report. Sunday, I think you said?"

She assented. Then her expression altered:

"When do you speak?"

The question fell out abruptly, and took George by surprise.

"I? On Monday, I believe, if I get my turn. But I fear the British Empire will go on if I don't!"

She threw a glance of scrutiny at his thin, whimsical face, with its fair moustache and sunburnt skin.

"I hear you are a good speaker," she said simply. "And you are entirely with Lord Fontenoy?"

He bowed lightly, his hands on his sides.

"You'll agree our case was well put? The worst of it—"

Then he stopped. He saw that Lady Maxwell had ceased to listen to him. She turned her head towards the door, and, without even saying good-bye to him, she hurried away from him towards the further end of the room.

"Maxwell, I see!" said Tressady to himself, with a shrug, as he returned to his seat. "Not flattering—but rather pretty, all the same!"

He was thinking of the quick change that had remade the face while he was talking to her—a change as lovely as it was unconscious.

Lord Maxwell, indeed, had just entered the dining-room in search of his wife, and he and she now left it together, while the rest of the Leven party gradually dispersed. Letty also announced that she must go home.

"Let me just go back into the House and see what is going on," said George. "Ten to one I sha'n't be wanted, and I could see you home."

He hurried off, only to return in a minute with the news that the debate was given up to a succession of superfluous people, and he was free, at any rate for an hour. Letty, Miss Tulloch, and he accordingly made their way to Palace Yard. A bright moon shone in their faces as they emerged into the open air, which was still mild and spring-like, as it had been all the week.

"I say—send Miss Tulloch home in a cab!" George pleaded in Letty's ear, "and walk with me a bit. Come and look at the moon over the river. I will bring you back to the bridge and put you in a cab."

Letty looked astonished and demure. "Aunt Charlotte would be shocked," she said.

George grew impatient, and Letty, pleased with his impatience, at last yielded. Tully, the most complaisant of chaperons, was put into a hansom and despatched.

As the pair reached the entrance of Palace Yard they were overtaken by a brougham, which drew up an instant in the gateway itself, till it should find an opening in the traffic outside.

"Look!" said George, pressing Letty's arm.

She looked round hurriedly, and, as the lamps of the gateway shone into the carriage, she caught a vivid glimpse of the people inside it. Their faces were turned towards each other as though in intimate conversation—that was all. The lady's hands were crossed on her knee; the man held a despatch-box. In a minute they were gone; but both Letty and George were left with the same impression—the sense of something exquisite surprised. It had already visited George that evening, only a few minutes earlier, in connection with the same woman's face.

Letty laughed, rather consciously.

George looked down upon her as he guided her through the gate.

"Some people seem to find it pleasant to be together!" he said, with a vibration in his voice. "But why did we look?" he added, discontentedly.

"How could we help it, you silly boy?"

They walked to wards the bridge and down the steps, happy in each other, and freshened by the night breeze. Over the river the moon, hung full and white, and beneath it everything—the silver tracks on the water, the blaze of light at Charing Cross Station, the lamps on Westminster Bridge and in the passing steamers, a train of barges, even the darkness of the Surrey shore—had a gentle and poetic air. The vast city had, as it were, veiled her greatness and her tragedy; she offered herself kindly and protectingly to these two—to their happiness and their youth.

George made his companion wait beside the parapet and look, while he himself drew in the air with a sort of hunger.

"To think of the hours we spend in this climate," he said, "caged up in abominable places like the House of Commons!"

The traveller's distaste for the monotony of town and indoor life spoke in his vehemence. Letty raised her eyebrows.

"I am very glad of my furs, thank you! You seem to forget that it is February."

"Never mind!—since Monday it has had the feel of April. Did you see my mother to-day?"

"Yes. She caught me just after luncheon, and we talked for an hour."

"Poor darling! I ought to have been there to protect you. But she vowed she would have her say about that house."

He looked down upon her, trying to see her expression in the shifting light. He had gone through a disagreeable little scene with his mother at breakfast. She had actually lectured him on the rashness of taking the Brook Street house!—he understanding the whole time that what the odd performance really meant was, that if he took it he would have a smaller margin of income wherefrom to supplement her allowance.

"Oh, it was all right!" said Letty, composedly. "She declared we should get into difficulties at once, that I could have no idea of the value of money, that you always had been extravagant, that everybody would be astonished at our doing such a thing, etcetera, etcetera. I think—you don't mind?—I think she cried a little. But she wasn't really very unhappy."

"What did you say?"

"Well, I suggested that when we were married, we and she should both set up account-books; and I promised faithfully that if she would let us see hers, we would let her see ours."

George threw back his head with a gurgle of laughter.

"Well?"

"She was afraid," said Letty, demurely, "that I didn't take things seriously enough. Then I asked her to come and see my gowns."

"And that, I suppose, appeased her?"

"Not at all. She turned up her nose at everything, by way of punishing me. You see, she had on a new-Worth—the third since Christmas. My poor little trousseau rags had no chance."

"H'm!" said George, meditatively. "I wonder how my mamma is going to manage when we are married," he added, after a pause.

Letty made no reply. She was walking firmly and briskly; her eyes, full of a sparkling decision, looked straight before her; her little mouth was close set. Meanwhile through George's mind there passed a number of fragmentary answers to his own question. His feeling towards his mother was wholly abnormal; he had no sense of any unseemliness in the conversation about her which was gradually growing common between himself and Letty; and he meant to draw strict lines in the future. At the same time, there was the tie of old habit, and of that uneasy and unwelcome responsibility with regard to her which had descended upon him at the time of his father's death. He could not honestly regard himself as an affectionate son; but the filial relationship, even in its most imperfect aspect, has a way of imposing itself.

"Ah, well! I daresay we shall pull through," he said, dismissing the familiar worry with a long breath. "Why, how far we have come!" he added, looking back at Charing Cross and the Westminster towers. "And how extraordinarily mild it is! We can't turn back yet, and you'll be tired if I race you on in this way. Look, Letty, there's a seat! Would you be afraid—just five minutes?"

Letty looked doubtful.

"It's so absurdly late. George, you are funny! Suppose somebody came by who knew us?"

He opened his eyes.

"And why not? But see! there isn't a carriage, and hardly a person, in sight. Just a minute!"

Most unwillingly Letty let herself be persuaded. It seemed to her a foolish and extravagant thing to do; and there was now no need for either folly or extravagance. Since her engagement she had dropped a good many of the small audacities of the social sort she had so freely allowed herself before it. It was as though, indeed, now that these audacities had served their purpose, some stronger and perhaps inherited instincts emerged in her, obscuring the earlier self. George was sometimes astonished by an ultra-conventional note, of which certainly he had heard nothing in their first days of intimacy at Malford.

However, she sat down beside him, protesting. But he had no sooner stolen her hand, than the moonlight showed her a dark, absent look creeping over his face. And to her amazement he began to talk about the House of Commons, about the Home Secretary's speech, of all things in the world! He seemed to be harking back to Mr. Dowson's arguments, to some of the stories the Home Secretary had told of those wretched people who apparently enjoy dying of overwork and phosphorus, and white-lead, who positively will die of them, unless the inspectors are always harrying them. He still held her hand, but she saw he was not thinking of her; and a sudden pique rose in her small mind. Generally, she accepted his love-making very coolly—just as it came, or did not come. But to-night she asked herself with irritation—for what had he led her into his silly escapade, but to make love to her? And now here were her fingers slipping out of his, while he harangued her on things she knew and cared nothing about, in a voice and manner he might have addressed to anybody!

"Well, I don't understand—I really don't!" she interrupted sharply. "I thought you were all against the Government—I thought you didn't believe a word they say!"

He laughed.

"The difference between them and us, darling, is only that they think the world can be mended by Act of Parliament, and we think it can't. Do what you will, we say the world is, and must be, a wretched hole for the majority of those that live in it; they suppose they can cure it by quack meddlings and tyrannies."

He looked straight before him, absorbed, and she was struck with the harsh melancholy of his face.

What on earth had he kept her here for to talk this kind of talk!

"George, I really must go!" she began, flushing, and drawing her hand away.

Instantly he turned to her, his look brightening and melting.

"Must you? Well, the world sha'n't be a wretched hole for us, shall it, darling? We'll make a little nest in it—we'll forget what we can't help—we'll be happy as long as the fates let us—won't we, Letty?"

His arm slipped round behind her. He caught her hands.

He had recollected himself. Nevertheless Letty was keenly conscious that it was all most absurd, this sitting on a seat in a public thoroughfare late at night, and behaving like any 'Arry and 'Arriet.

"Why, of course we shall be happy," she said, rising with decision as she spoke; "only somehow I don't always understand you, George. I wish I knew what you were really thinking about."

"You!" he said, laughing, and drawing her hand within his arm, as they turned backwards towards the bridge.

She shook her head doubtfully. Whereupon he awoke fully to the situation, and during the short remainder of their walk he wooed and flattered her as usual. But when he had put her safely into a hansom at the corner of the bridge, and smiled good-bye to her, he turned to walk back to the House in much sudden flatness of mood. Her little restless egotisms of mind and manner had chilled him unawares. Had Fontenoy's speech been so fine, after all? Were politics—was anything—quite worth while? It seemed to him that all emotions were small, all crises disappointing.



CHAPTER VI

The following Sunday, somewhere towards five o'clock, George rang the bell of the Maxwells' house in St. James's Square. It was a very fine house, and George's eye, as he stood waiting, ran over the facade with an amused, investigating look.

He allowed himself the same expression once or twice in the hall, as one mute and splendid person relieved him of his coat, and another, equally mute and equally unsurpassable, waited for him on the stairs, while across a passage beyond the hall he saw two red-liveried footmen carrying tea.

"When one is a friend of the people," he pondered as he went upstairs, "is one limited in horses but not in flunkeys? These things are obscure."

He was ushered first into a stately outer drawing-room, filled with old French furniture and fine pictures; then the butler lifted a velvet curtain, pronounced the visitor's name with a voice and emphasis as perfectly trained as the rest of him, and stood aside for George to enter.

He found himself on the threshold of a charming room looking west, and lit by some last beams of February sun. The pale-green walls were covered with a medley of prints and sketches. A large writing-table, untidily heaped with papers, stood conspicuous on the blue self-coloured carpet, which over a great part of the floor was pleasantly void and bare. Flat earthenware pans, planted with hyacinths and narcissus, stood here and there, and filled the air with spring scents. Books ran round the lower walls, or lay piled where-ever there was a space for them; while about the fire at the further end was gathered a circle of chintz-covered chairs—chairs of all shapes and sizes, meant for talking. The whole impression of the pretty, disorderly place, compared with the stately drawing-room behind it, was one of intimity and freedom; the room made a friend of you as you entered.

Half a dozen people were sitting with Lady Maxwell when Tressady was announced. She rose to meet him with great cordiality, introduced him to little Lady Leven, an elfish creature in a cloud of fair hair, and with a pleasant "You know all the rest," offered him a chair beside herself and the tea-table.

"The rest" were Frank Leven, Edward Watton, Bayle, the Foreign Office private secretary who had been staying at Malford House at the time of Tressady's election, and Bennett, the "small, dark man" whom George had pointed out to Letty in the House as a Labour member, and one of the Maxwells' particular friends.

"Well?" said Lady Maxwell, turning to her new visitor as she handed him some tea, "were you as much taken with the grandmother as the grandmother was taken with you? She told me she had never seen a 'more haffable gentleman, nor one as she'd a been more willin to ha done for'!"

George laughed. "I see," he said, "that my report has been anticipated."

"Yes—I have been there. I have found a 'case' in them indeed—alack! The granny—I am afraid she is an unseemly old woman—and the elder girl both work for the Jew son-in-law on the first floor—homework of the most abominable kind—that girl will be dead in a year if it goes on."

George was rapidly conscious of two contradictory impressions—one of pleasure, one of annoyance—pleasure in her tall, slim presence, her white hand, and all the other flashing points of a beauty not to be denied—and irritation that she should have talked "shop" to him with her first breath. Could one never escape this altruistic chatter?

But he was not left to grapple with it alone, for Lady Leven looked up quickly.

"Mr. Watton, will you please take Lady Maxwell's tea away if she mentions the word 'case' again? We gave her fair warning."

Lady Maxwell hastily clasped both her hands round her tea-cup.

"Betty, we have discussed the opera for at least twenty minutes."

"Yes—at peril of our lives!" said Lady Leven. "I never talked so fast before. One felt as though one must say everything one had to say about Melba and the de Reszkes, all in one breath—before one's poor little subject was torn from one—one would never have such a chance again."

Lady Maxwell laughed, but coloured too.

"Am I such a nuisance?" she said, dropping her hands on her knee with a little sigh. Then she turned to Tressady.

"But Lady Leven really makes it out worse than it is. We haven't even approached a Factory Act all the afternoon."

Lady Leven sprang forward in her chair. "Because! because, my dear, we simply declined to let you. We made a league—didn't we, Mr. Bennett?—even you joined it."

Bennett smiled.

"Lady Maxwell overworks herself—we all know that," he said, his look, at once kind, honest, and perennially embarrassed, passing from Lady Leven to his hostess.

"Oh, don't sympathise, for Heaven's sake!" cried Betty. "Wage war upon her—it's our only hope."

"Don't you think Sunday at least ought to be frivolous?" said Tressady, smiling, to Lady Maxwell.

"Well, personally, I like to talk about what interests me on Sunday as well as on other days," she said with a frank simplicity; "but I know I ought to be kept in order—I become a terrible bore."

Frank Leven roused himself from the sofa on which he had languidly subsided.

"Bores?" he said indignantly, "we're all bores. We all have been bores since people began to think about what they're pleased to call 'social work.' Why should I love my neighbour?—I'd much rather hate him. I generally do."

"Doesn't it all depend," said Tressady, "on whether he happens to be able to make it disagreeable for you in return?"

"That's just it," said Betty Leven, eagerly. "I agree with Frank—it's all so stupid, this 'loving' everybody. It makes one positively hot. We sit under a clergyman, Frank and I, who talks of nothing every Sunday but love—love—like that, long-drawn-out—how our politics should be 'love,' and our shopping should be 'love'—till we long simply to bastinado somebody. I want to have a little real nice cruelty—something sharp and interesting. I should like to stick pins into my maid, only unfortunately, as she has more than once pointed out to me, it would be so much easier for her to stick them into me!"

"You want the time of Miss Austen's novels back again," said young Bayle, stooping to her, with his measured and agreeable smile—"before even the clergy had a mission."

"Ah! but it would be no good," said Lady Leven, sighing, "if she were there!"

She threw out her small hand towards her hostess, and everybody laughed.

Up to the moment of the laugh, Lady Maxwell had been lying back in her chair listening, the beautiful mouth absently merry, and the eyes speaking—Tressady thought—of quite other things, of some hidden converse of her own, going on in the brain behind the eyes. A certain prophetess-air seemed natural to her. Nevertheless, that first impression of her he had carried away from the hospital scene was being somehow blurred and broken up.

She joined in the laugh against herself; then, with a little nod towards her assailant, she said to Edward Watton, who was sitting on her right hand. "You're not taken in, I know."

"Oh, if you mean that I go in for 'cases' and 'causes' too," cried Lady Leven, interrupting, "of course I do—I can't be left alone. I must dance as my generation pipes."

"Which means," said her husband, drily, "that she went for two days filling soda-water bottles the week before last, and a day's shirt-making last week. From the first, I was told that she would probably return to me with an eye knocked out, she being totally inexperienced and absurdly rash. As to the second, to judge from the description she gave me of the den she had been sitting in when she came home, and the headache she had next day, I still expect typhoid. The fortnight isn't up till Wednesday."

There was a shout of mingled laughter and inquiry.

"How did you do it?—and whom did you bribe?" said Bayle to Lady Leven.

"I didn't bribe anybody," she said indignantly. "You don't understand. My friends introduced me."

Then, drawn out by him, she plunged into a lively account of her workshop experiences, interrupted every now and then by the sarcastic comments of her husband and the amusement of the two younger men who had brought their chairs close to her. Betty Leven ranked high among the lively chatterboxes of her day and set.

Lady Maxwell, however, had not laughed at Frank Leven's speech. Rather, as he spoke of his wife's experiences, her face had clouded, as though the blight of some too familiar image, some sad ever-present vision, had descended upon her.

Beimett also did not laugh. He watched the Levens indulgently for a few minutes, then insensibly he, Lady Maxwell, Edward Watton, and Tressady drew together into a circle of their own.

"Do you gather that Lord Fontenoy's speech on Friday has been much taken up in the country?" said Bennett, bending forward and addressing Lady Maxwell. Tressady, who was observing him, noticed that his dress was precisely the "Sunday best" of the respectable workman, and was, moreover, reminded by the expression of the eyes and brow that Bennett was said to have been a well-known "local preacher" in his north-country youth.

Lady Maxwell smiled, and pointed to Tressady.

"Here," she said, "is Lord Fontenoy's first-lieutenant."

Bennett looked at George.

"I should be glad," he said, "to know what Sir George thinks?"

"Why, certainly—we think it has been very warmly taken up," said George, promptly—"to judge from the newspapers, the letters that have been pouring in, and the petitions that seem to be preparing."

Lady Maxwell's eyes gleamed. She looked at Bennett silently a moment, then she said:

"Isn't it amazing to you how strong an impossible case can be made to look?"

"It is inevitable," said Bennett, with a little shrug, "quite inevitable. These social experiments of ours are so young—there is always a strong case to be made out against any of them, and there will be for years to come."

"Well and good," said George; "then we cavillers are inevitable too. Don't attack us—praise us rather; by your own confession, we are as much a part of the game as you are."

Bennett smiled slightly, but did not in reality quite follow. Lady Maxwell bent forward.

"Do you know whether Lord Fontenoy has any personal knowledge of the trades he was speaking about?" she said, in her rich eager voice; "that is what I want so much to find out."

George was nettled by both the question and the manner.

"I regard Fontenoy as a very competent person," he said drily. "I imagine he did his best to inform himself. But there was not much need; the persons concerned—whom you think you are protecting—were so very eager to inform us!"

Lady Maxwell flushed.

"And you think that settles it—the eagerness of the cheap life to be allowed to maim and waste itself? But again and again English law has stepped in to prevent it—and again and again everybody has been thankful."

"It is all a question of balance, of course," said George. "Must a few unwise people be allowed to kill themselves—or thousands lose their liberty?"

His blue eyes scanned her beautiful impetuous face with a certain cool hardness. Internally he was more and more in revolt against a "monstrous regiment of women" and the influence upon the most complex economic problems of such a personality as that before him.

But his word "liberty" pricked her. The look of feeling passed away. Her eyes kindled as sharply and drily as his own.

"Freedom?—let me quote you Cromwell! 'Every sectary saith, "O give me liberty!" But give it him, and to the best of his power he will yield it to no one else.' So with your careless or brutal employer—give him liberty, and no one else shall get it."

"Only by metaphor—not legally," said George, stubbornly. "So long as men are not slaves by law there is always a chance for freedom. Any way we stand for freedom—as an end, not a means. It is not the business of the State to make people happy—not at all!—at least that is our view—but it is the business of the State to keep them free."

"Ah!" said Bennett, with a long breath, "there you've hit the nail—the whole difference between you and us."

George nodded. Lady Maxwell did not speak immediately. But George was conscious that he was being observed, closely considered. Their glances crossed an instant, in antagonism, certainly, if not in dislike.

"How long is it since you came home from India?" she asked him suddenly.

"About six months."

"And you were, I think, a long time abroad?"

"Nearly four years. Does that make you think I have not had much time to get up the things I am going to vote about?" said the young man, laughing. "I don't know! On the broadest issues of politics, one makes up one's mind as well in Asia as in Europe—better perhaps."

"On the Empire, I suppose—and England's place in the world? That's a side which—I know—I remember much too little. You think our life depends on a governing class—and that we and democracy are weakening that class too much?"

"That's about it. And for democracy it is all right. But you—you are the traitors!"

His thrust, however, did not rouse her to any corresponding rhetoric. She smiled merely, and began to question him about his travels. She did it with great deftness, so that after an answer or two both his temper and manner insensibly softened, and he found himself talking with ease and success. His mixed personality revealed itself—his capacity for certain veiled enthusiasms, his respect for power, for knowledge, his pessimist beliefs as to the average lot of men.