Meanwhile Lady Tranmore had reached home, and after one of those pathetic hours in her husband's room which made the secret and sacred foundation of her daily life, she expected Mary Lyster, who was to dine at Tranmore House before the two ladies presented themselves at a musical party given by the French Ambassadress. Before her guest's arrival, Lady Tranmore wandered about her rooms, unable to rest, unable even to read the evening papers on Ashe's speech, so possessed was she still by her altercation with Kitty, and by the foreboding sense of what it meant. William's future was threatened; and the mother whose whole proud heart had been thrown for years into every successful effort and every upward step of her son, was up in arms.

Mary Lyster arrived to the minute. She came in, a tall gliding woman, her hair falling in rippled waves on either side of her face, which in its ample comeliness and placidity reminded the Italianate Lady Tranmore of many faces well known to her in early Siennese or Florentine art. Mary's dress to-night was of a noble red, and the glossy brown of her hair made a harmony both with her dress and with the whiteness of her neck that contented the fastidious eye of her companion. "Polly" was now thirty, in the prime of her good looks. Lady Tranmore's affection for her, which had at one time even included the notion that she might possibly become William Ashe's wife, did not at all interfere with a shrewd understanding of her limitations. But she was daughterless herself; her family feeling was strong; and Mary's society was an old and pleasant habit one could ill have parted with. In her company, moreover, Mary was at her best.

Elizabeth Tranmore never discussed her daughter-in-law with her cousin. Loyalty to William forbade it, no less than a strong sense of family dignity. For Mary had spoken once—immediately after the engagement—with energy—nay, with passion; prophesying woe and calamity. Thenceforward it was tacitly agreed between them that all root-and-branch criticism of Kitty and her ways was taboo. Mary was, indeed, on apparently good terms with her cousin's wife. She dined occasionally at the Ashes', and she and Kitty met frequently under the wing of Lady Tranmore. There was no cordiality between them, and Kitty was often sharply or sulkily certain that Mary was to be counted among those hostile forces with which, in some of her moods, the world seemed to her to bristle. But if Mary kept, in truth, a very sharp tongue for many of her intimates on the subject of Kitty, Lady Tranmore at least was determined to know nothing about it.

On this particular evening, however, Lady Tranmore's self-control failed her, for the first time in three years. She had not talked five minutes with her guest before she perceived that Mary's mind was, in truth, brimful of gossip—the gossip of many drawing-rooms—as to Kitty's escapade with the Prince, Kitty's relations to Lady Partham, Kitty's parties, and Kitty's whims. The temptation was too great; her own guard broke down.

"I hear Kitty is furious with the Parhams," said Mary, as the two ladies sat together after their rapid dinner. It was a rainy night, and the fire to which they had drawn up was welcome.

Lady Tranmore shook her head sadly.

"I don't know where it is to end," she said, slowly.

"Lady Parham told me yesterday—you don't mind my repeating it?"—Mary looked up with a smile—"she was still dreadfully afraid that Kitty would play her some trick about next Friday. She knows that Kitty detests her."

"Oh no," said Lady Tranmore, in a vague voice, "Kitty couldn't—impossible!"

Mary turned an observant eye upon her companion's conscious and troubled air, and drew conclusions not far from the truth.

"And it's all so awkward, isn't it?" she said, with sympathy, "when apparently Lady Parham is as much Prime Minister as he is."

For in those days certain great houses and political ladies, though not at the zenith of their power, were still, in their comparative decline, very much to be reckoned with. When Lady Parham talked longer than usual with the French Ambassador, his Austrian and German colleagues wrote anxious despatches to their governments; when a special mission to the East of great importance had to be arranged, nobody imagined that Lord Parham had very much to do with the appointment of the commissioner, who happened to have just engaged himself to Lady Parham's second girl. No young member on the government side, if he wanted office, neglected Lady Parham's invitations, and admission to her more intimate dinners was still almost as much coveted as similar favors had been a generation before in the case of Lady Jersey, or still earlier, in that of Lady Holland. She was a small old woman, with a shrewish face, a waxen complexion, and a brown wig. In spite of short sight, she saw things that escaped most other people; her tongue was rarely at a loss; she was, on the whole, a good friend, though never an unreflecting one; and what she forgave might be safely reckoned as not worth resenting.

Elizabeth Tranmore received Mary's remark with reluctant consent. Lady Parham—from the English aristocratic stand-point—was not well-born. She had been the daughter of a fashionable music-master, whose blood was certainly not Christian. And there were many people beside Lady Tranmore who resented her domination.

"It will be so perfectly easy when the moment comes to invent some excuse or other for shelving William's claims," sighed Ashe's mother. "Nobody is indispensable, and if that old woman is provoked, she will be capable of any mischief."

"What do you want for William?" said Mary, smiling.

"He ought, of course, to have the Home Office!" replied Lady Tranmore, with fire.

Mary vowed that he would certainly have it. "Kitty is so clever, she will understand how important discretion is, before things go too far."

Lady Tranmore made no answer. She gazed into the fire, and Miss Lyster thought her depressed.

"Has William ever interfered?" she asked, cautiously.

Lady Tranmore hesitated.

"Not that I know of," she said, at last. "Nor will he ever—in the sense in which any ordinary husband would interfere."

"I know! It is as though he had a kind of superstition about it. Isn't there a fairy story, in which an elf marries a mortal on condition that if he ever ill-treats her, her people will fetch her back to fairyland? One day the husband lost his temper and spoke crossly; instantly there was a crash of thunder and the elf-wife vanished."

"I don't remember the story. But it's like that—exactly. He said to me once that he would never have asked her to marry him if he had not been able to make up his mind to let her have her own way—never to coerce her."

But having said this, Lady Tranmore repented. It seemed to her she had been betraying William's affairs. She drew her chair back from the fire, and rang to ask if the carriage had arrived. Mary took the hint. She arrayed herself in her cloak, and chatted agreeably about other things till the moment for their departure came.

As they drove through the streets, Lady Tranmore stole a glance at her companion.

"She is really very handsome," she thought—"much better-looking than she was at twenty. What are the men about, not to marry her?"

It was indeed a puzzle. For Mary was increasingly agreeable as the years went on, and had now quite a position of her own in London, as a charming woman without angles or apparent egotisms; one of the initiated besides, whom any dinner-party might be glad to capture. Her relations, near and distant, held so many of the points of vantage in English public life that her word inevitably carried weight. She talked politics, as women of her class must talk them to hold their own; she supported the Church; and she was elegantly charitable, in that popular sense which means that you subscribe to your friends' charities without setting up any of your own. She was rich also—already in possession of a considerable fortune, inherited from her mother, and prospective heiress of at least as much again from her father, old Sir Richard Lyster, whose house in Somersetshire she managed to perfection. In the season she stayed with various friends, or with Lady Tranmore, Sir Richard being now infirm, and preferring the country. There was a younger sister, who was known to have married imprudently, and against her father's wishes, some five or six years before this. Catharine was poor, the wife of a clergyman with young children. Lady Tranmore sometimes wondered whether Mary was quite as good to her as she might be. She herself sent Catharine various presents in the course of the year for the children.

—Yes, it was certainly surprising that Mary had not married. Lady Tranmore's thoughts were running on this tack when of a sudden her eyes were caught by the placard of one of the evening papers.

"Interview with Mr. Cliffe. Peace assured." So ran one of the lines.

"Geoffrey Cliffe home again!" Lady Tranmore's tone betrayed a shade of contemptuous amusement.

"We shall have to get on without our daily telegram. Poor London!"

If at that moment it had occurred to her to look at her companion, she would have seen a quick reddening of Mary's cheeks.

"He has had a great success, though, with his telegrams!" replied Miss Lyster. "I should have thought one couldn't deny that."

"Success! Only with the people who don't matter," said Lady Tranmore, with a shrug. "Of what importance is it to anybody that Geoffrey Cliffe should telegraph his doings and his opinions every morning to the English public?"

We were in the midst of a disagreement with America. A whirlwind was unloosed, and as it happened Geoffrey Cliffe was riding it. For that gentleman had not succeeded in the designs which were occupying his mind when he had first made Kitty's acquaintance in the Grosvilles' country-house. He had desired an appointment in Egypt; but it had not been given him, and after some angry restlessness at home, he had once more taken up a pilgrim's staff and departed on fresh travels, bound this time for the Pamirs and Thibet. After nearly three years, during which he had never ceased, through the newspapers and periodicals, to keep his opinions and his personality before the public, he had been heard of in China, and as returning home by America. He arrived at San Francisco just as the dispute had broken out, was at once captured by an English paper, and sent to New York, with carte blanche. He had risen with alacrity to the situation. Thenceforward for some three weeks, England found a marvellous series of large-print telegrams, signed "Geoffrey Cliffe," awaiting her each morning on her breakfast-table.

"'The President and I met this morning'—'The President considers, and I agree with him'—'I told the President'—etc.—'The President this morning signed and sealed a memorable despatch. He said to me afterwards'"—etc.

Two diverse effects seemed to have been produced by these proceedings. A certain section of Radical opinion, which likes to see affairs managed sans cérémonie, and does not understand what the world wants with diplomatists when journalists are to be had, applauded; the old-fashioned laughed.

It was said that Cliffe was going into the House immediately; the young bloods of the party in power enjoyed the prospect, and had already stored up the ego et Rex meus details of his correspondence for future use.

"How could a man make such a fool of himself!" continued Lady Tranmore, the malice in her voice expressing not only the old aristocratic dislike of the press, but also the jealousy natural to the mother of an official son.

"Well, we shall see," said Mary, after a pause. "I don't quite agree with you, Cousin Elizabeth—indeed, I know there are many people who think that he has certainly done good."

Lady Tranmore turned in astonishment. She had expected Mary's assent to her original remark as a matter of course. Mary's old flirtation with Geoffrey Cliffe, and the long breach between them which had followed it, were things well known to her. They had coincided, moreover, with her own dropping of the man whom for various reasons she had come to regard as unscrupulous and unsafe.

"Good!" she echoed—"good?—with that boasting, and that fanfaronnade. Polly!"

But Miss Lyster held her ground.

"We must allow everybody their own ways of doing things, mustn't we? I am quite sure he has meant well—all through."

Lady Tranmore shrugged her shoulders. "Lord Parham told me he had had the most grotesque letters from him!—and meant henceforward to put them in the fire."

"Very foolish of Lord Parham," said Mary, promptly. "I should have thought that a Prime Minister would welcome information—from all sides. And of course Mr. Cliffe thinks that the government has been very badly served."

Lady Tranmore's wonder broke out. "You don't mean—that—you hear from him?"

She turned and looked full at her companion. Mary's color was still raised, but otherwise she betrayed no embarrassment.

"Yes, dear Cousin Elizabeth. I have heard from him regularly for the last six months. I have often wished to tell you, but I was afraid you might misunderstand me, and—my courage failed me!" The speaker, smiling, laid her hand on Lady Tranmore's. "The fact is, he wrote to me last autumn from Japan. You remember that poor cousin of mine who died at Tokio? Mr. Cliffe had seen something of him, and he very kindly wrote both to his mother and me afterwards. Then—"

"You didn't forgive him!" cried Lady Tranmore.

Mary laughed.

"Was there anything to forgive? We were both young and foolish. Anyway, he interests me—and his letters are splendid."

"Did you ever tell William you were corresponding with him?"

"No, indeed! But I want very much to make them understand each other better. Why shouldn't the government make use of him? He doesn't wish at all to be thrown into the arms of the other side. But they treat him so badly—"

"My dear Mary! are we governed by the proper people, or are we not?"

"It is no good ignoring the press," said Mary, holding herself gracefully erect. "And the Bishop quite agrees with me."

Lady Tranmore sank back in her seat.

"You discussed it with the Bishop?" It was now some time since Mary had last brought the family Bishop—her cousin, and Lady Tranmore's—to bear upon an argument between them. But Elizabeth knew that his appearance in the conversation invariably meant a fait accompli of some sort.

"I read him some of Mr. Cliffe's letters," said Mary, modestly. "He thought them most remarkable."

"Even when he mocks at missionaries?"

"Oh! but he doesn't mock at them any more. He has learned wisdom—I assure you he has!"

Lady Tranmore's patience almost departed, Mary's look was so penetrated with indulgence for the prejudices of a dear but unreasonable relation. But she managed to preserve it.

"And you knew he was coming home?"

"Oh yes!" said Mary. "I meant to have told you at dinner. But something put it out of my head—Kitty, of course! I shouldn't wonder if he were at the embassy to-night."

"Polly! tell me—"—Lady Tranmore gripped Miss Lyster's hand with some force—"are you going to marry him?"

"Not that I know of," was the smiling reply. "Don't you think I'm old enough by now to have a man friend?"

"And you expect me to be civil to him!"

"Well, dear Cousin Elizabeth—you know—you never did break with him, quite."

Lady Tranmore, in her bewilderment, reflected that she had certainly meant to complete the process whenever she and Mr. Cliffe should meet again. Aloud she could only say, rather stiffly:

"I can't forget that William disapproves of him strongly."

"Oh no—excuse me—I don't think he does!" said Mary, quickly. "He said to me, the other day, that he should be very glad to pick his brains when he came home. And then he laughed and said he was a 'deuced clever fellow'—excuse the adjective—and it was a great thing to be 'as free as that chap was'—'without all sorts of boring colleagues and responsibilities.' Wasn't it like William?"

Lady Tranmore sighed.

"William shouldn't say those things."

"Of course, dear, he was only in fun. But I'll lay you a small wager, Cousin Elizabeth, that Kitty will ask Mr. Cliffe to lunch as soon as she knows he is in town."

Lady Tranmore turned away.

"I dare say. No one can answer for what Kitty will do. But Geoffrey Cliffe has said scandalous things of William."

"He won't say them again," said Mary, soothingly. "Besides, William never minds being abused a bit—does he?"

"He should mind," said Lady Tranmore, drawing herself up. "In my young days, our enemies were our enemies and our friends our friends. Nowadays nothing seems to matter. You may call a man a scoundrel one day and ask him to dinner the next. We seem to use words in a new sense—and I confess I don't like the change. Well, Mary, I sha'n't, of course, be rude to any friend of yours. But don't expect me to be effusive. And please remember that my acquaintance with Geoffrey Cliffe is older than yours."

Mary made a caressing reply, and gave her mind for the rest of the drive to the smoothing of Lady Tranmore's ruffled plumes. But it was not easy. As that lady made her way up the crowded staircase of the French Embassy, her fine face was still absent and a little stern.

Mary could only reflect that she had at least got through a first explanation which was bound to be made. Then for a few minutes her mind surrendered itself wholly to the question, "Will he be here?"

The rooms of the French Embassy were already crowded. An ambassador, short, stout, and somewhat morose, his plain features and snub nose emerging with difficulty from his thick, fair hair, superabundant beard, and mustache—with an elegant and smiling ambassadress, personifying amid the English crowd that Paris from which through every fibre she felt herself a pining exile—received the guests. The scene was ablaze with uniforms, for the Speaker had been giving a dinner, and Royalty was expected. But, as Lady Tranmore perceived at once, very few members of the House of Commons were present. A hot debate on some detail of the naval estimates had been sprung on ministers, and the whips on each side had been peremptorily keeping their forces in hand.

"I don't see either William or Kitty," said Mary, after a careful scrutiny not, in truth, directed to the discovery of the Ashes.

"No. I suppose William was kept, and Kitty did not care to come alone."

Mary said nothing. But she was well aware that Kitty was never restrained from going into society by the mere absence of her husband. Meanwhile Lady Tranmore was lost in secret anxieties as to what might have happened in Hill Street. Had there been a quarrel? Something certainly had gone wrong, or Kitty would be here.

"Lady Kitty not arrived?" said a voice, like a macaw's, beside her.

Elizabeth turned and shook hands with Lady Parham. That extraordinary woman, followed everywhere by the attentive observation of the crowd, had never asserted herself more sharply in dress, manner, and coiffure than on this particular evening—so it seemed, at least, to Lady Tranmore. Her ample figure was robed in the white satin of a bride, her wrinkled neck disappeared under a weight of jewels, and her bright chestnut wig, to which the diamond tiara was fastened, positively attacked the spectator, so patent was it and unashamed. Unashamed, too, were the bold, tyrannous eyes, the rouge-spots on either cheek, the strength of the jaw, the close-shut ability of the mouth. Elizabeth Tranmore looked at her with a secret passion of dislike. Her English pride of race, no less than the prejudices of her taste and training, could hardly endure the fact that, for William's sake, she must make herself agreeable to Lady Parham.

Agreeable, however, she tried to be. Kitty had seemed to her tired in the afternoon, and had, no doubt, gone to bed—so she averred.

Lady Parham laughed.

"Well, she mustn't be tired the night of my party next week—or the skies will fall. I never took so much trouble before about anything in my life."

"No, she must take care," said Lady Tranmore. "Unfortunately, she is not strong, and she does too much."

Lady Parham threw her a sharp look.

"Not strong? I should have thought Lady Kitty was made on wires. Well, if she fails me, I shall go to bed—with small-pox. There will be nothing else to be done. The Princess has actually put off another engagement to come—she has heard so much of Lady Kitty's reciting. But you'll help me through, won't you?"

And the wrinkled face and harsh lips fell into a contortion meant for a confidential smile; while through it all the eyes, wholly independent, studied the face beside her—closely, suspiciously—until the owner of it in her discomfort could almost have repeated aloud the words that were ringing in her mind—"I shall not go to Lady Parham's! My note will reach her on the stroke of eight."

"Certainly—I will keep an eye on her!" she said, lightly. "But you know—since her illness—"

"Oh no!" said Lady Parham, impatiently, "she is very well—very well indeed. I never saw her look so radiant. By-the-way, did you hear your son's speech the other night? I did not see you in the gallery. A great pity if you missed it. It was admirable."

Lady Tranmore replied regretfully that she had not been there, and that she had not been able to have a word with him about it since.

"Oh, he knows he did well," said Lady Parham, carelessly. "They all do. Lord Parham was delighted. He could do nothing but talk about it at dinner. He says they were in a very tight place, and Mr. Ashe got them out."

Lady Tranmore expressed her gratification with all the dignity she could command, conscious meanwhile that her companion was not listening to a word, absorbed as she was in a hawklike examination of the room through a pair of gold-rimmed eye-glasses.

Suddenly the eye-glasses fell with a rattle.

"Good Heavens!" cried Lady Parham. "Do you see who that is talking to Mr. Loraine?"

Lady Tranmore looked, and at once perceived Geoffrey Cliffe in close conversation with the leader of the Opposition. The lady beside her gave an angry laugh.

"If Mr. Cliffe thinks he has done himself any good by these ridiculous telegrams of his, he will find himself mistaken! People are perfectly furious about them."

"Naturally," said Lady Tranmore. "Only that it is a pity to take him seriously."

"Oh, I don't know. He has his following; unfortunately, some of our own men are inclined to think that Parham should conciliate him. Ignore him, I say. Behave as though he didn't exist. Ah! by-the-way"—the speaker raised herself on tiptoe, and said, in an audacious undertone—"is it true that he may possibly marry your cousin, Miss Lyster?"

Lady Tranmore kept a smiling composure. "Is it true that Lord Parham may possibly give him an appointment?"

Lady Parham turned away in annoyance. "Is that one of the inventions going about?"

"There are so many," said Lady Tranmore.

At that moment, however, to her infinite relief, her companion abruptly deserted her. She was free to observe the two distant figures in conversation—Geoffrey Cliffe and Mr. Loraine, the latter a man now verging on old age, white-haired and wrinkled, but breathing still through every feature and every movement the scarcely diminished energy of his magnificent prime. He stood with bent head, listening attentively, but, as Lady Tranmore thought, coldly, to the arguments that Cliffe was pouring out upon him. Once he looked up in a sudden recoil, and there was a flash from an eye famous for its power of majestic or passionate rebuke. Cliffe, however, took no notice, and talked on, Loraine still listening.

"Look at them!" said Lady Parham, venomously, in the ear of one of her intimates. "We shall have all this out in the House to-morrow. The Opposition mean to play that man for all he's worth. Mr. Loraine, too—with his puritanical ways! I know what he thinks of Cliffe. He wouldn't touch him in private. But in public—you'll see—he'll swallow him whole—just to annoy Parham. There's your politician."

And stiff with the angry virtue of the "ins," denouncing the faction of the "outs," Lady Parham passed on.

Elizabeth Tranmore meanwhile turned to look for Mary Lyster. She found her close behind, engaged in a perfunctory conversation, which evidently left her quite free to follow things more exciting. She, too, was watching; and presently it seemed to Lady Tranmore that her eyes met with those of Cliffe. Cliffe paused; abruptly lost the thread of his conversation with Mr. Loraine, and began to make his way through the crowded room. Lady Tranmore watched his progress with some attention. It was the progress, clearly, of a man much in the eye and mouth of the public. Whether the atmosphere surrounding him in these rooms was more hostile or more favorable, Lady Tranmore could not be quite sure. Certainly the women smiled upon him; and his strange face, thinner, browner, more weather-beaten and life-beaten than ever, under its crest of grizzling hair, had the old arrogant and picturesque power, but, as it seemed to her, with something added—something subtler, was it, more romantic than of yore? which arrested the spectator. Had he really been in love with that French woman? Lady Tranmore had heard it rumored that she was dead.

It was not towards Mary Lyster, primarily, that he was moving, Elizabeth soon discovered; it was towards herself. She braced herself for the encounter.

The greeting was soon over. After she herself had said the appropriate things, Lady Tranmore had time to notice that Mary Lyster, whose turn came next, did not attempt to say them. She looked, indeed, unusually handsome and animated; Lady Tranmore was certain that Cliffe had noticed as much, at his first sight of her. But the remarks she omitted showed how minute and recent was their knowledge of each other's movements. Cliffe himself gave a first impression of high spirits. He declared that London was more agreeable than he had ever known it, and that after his three years' absence nobody looked a day older. Then he inquired after Ashe.

Lady Tranmore replied that William was well, but hard-worked; she hoped to persuade him to get a few days abroad at Whitsuntide. Her manner was quiet, without a trace of either discourtesy or effusion. Cliffe began to twist his mustache, a sign she knew well. It meant that he was in truth both irritable and nervous.

"You think they'll last till Whitsuntide?"

"The government?" she said, smiling. "Certainly—and beyond."

"I give them three weeks," said Cliffe, twisting anew, with a vigor that gave her a positive physical sympathy with the tortured mustache. "There will be some papers out to-morrow that will be a bomb-shell."

"About America? Oh, they have been blown up so often! You, for instance, have been doing your best—for months."

His perfunctory laugh answered the mockery of her charming eyes.

"Well—I wish I could make William hear reason."

Lady Tranmore held herself stiffly. The Christian name seemed to her an offence. It was true that in old days he and Cliffe had been on those terms. Now—it was a piece of bad taste.

"Probably what is reason to you is folly to him," she said, dryly.

"No, no!—he knows," said Cliffe, with impatience. "The others don't. Parham is more impossible—more crassly, grossly ignorant!" He lifted hands and eyes in protest. "But Ashe, of course, is another matter altogether."

"Well, go and see him—go and talk to him!" said Lady Tranmore, still mocking. "There are no lions in the way."

"None," said Cliffe. "As a matter of fact, Lady Kitty has asked me to luncheon. But does one find Ashe himself in the middle of the day?"

At the mention of her daughter-in-law Elizabeth made an involuntary movement. Mary, standing beside her, turned towards her and smiled.

"Not often." The tone was cold. "But you could always find him at the House." And Lady Tranmore moved away.

"Is there a quiet corner anywhere?" said Cliffe to Mary. "I have such heaps to tell you."

So while some Polish gentleman in the main drawing-room, whose name ended in ski, challenged his violin to the impossible, Cliffe and Mary retired from observation into a small room thrown open with the rest of the suite, which was in truth the morning-room of the ambassadress.

As soon as they found themselves alone, there was a pause in their conversation; each involuntarily looked at the other. Mary certainly recognized that these years of absence had wrought a noticeable change in the man before her. He had aged. Hard living and hard travelling had left their marks. But, like Lady Tranmore, she also perceived another difference. The eyes bent upon her were indeed, as before, the eyes of a man self-centred, self-absorbed. There was no chivalrous softness in them, no consideration. The man who owned them used them entirely for his own purposes; they betrayed none of that changing instinctive relation towards the human being—any human being—within their range, which makes the charm of so many faces. But they were sadder, more sombre, more restless; they thrilled her more than they had already thrilled her once, in the first moment of her youth.

What was he going to say? From the moment of his first letter to her from Japan, Mary had perfectly understood that he had some fresh purpose in his mind. She was not anxious, however, to precipitate the moment of explanation. She was no longer the young girl whose equilibrium is upset by the mere approach of the man who interests her. Moreover, there was a past between herself and Cliffe, the memory of which might indeed point her to caution. Did he now, after all, want to marry her—because she was rich, and he was comparatively poor, and could only secure an English career at the cost of a well-stored wife? Well, all that should be thought over; by herself no less than by him. Meanwhile her vanity glowed within her, as she thus held him there, alone, to the discomfiture of other women more beautiful and more highly placed than herself; as she remembered his letters in her desk at home; and the secrets she imagined him to have told her. Then again she felt a rush of sudden disquiet, caused by this new aspect—wavering and remote—as though some hidden grief emerged and vanished. He had the haggard air of a man who scarcely sleeps. All that she had ever heard of the French affair rushed through her mind, stirring there an angry curiosity.

These impressions took, however, but a few minutes, while they exchanged some conventionalities. Then Cliffe said, scrutinizing the face and form beside him with that intentness which, from him, was more generally taken as compliment than offence:

"Will you excuse the remark? There are no women who keep their first freshness like Englishwomen."

"Thank you. If we feel fresh, I suppose we look it. As for you, you clearly want a rest."

"No time to think of it, then; I have come home to fight—all I know; to make myself as odious as possible."

Mary laughed.

"You have been doing that so long. Why not try the opposite?"

Cliffe looked at her sharply.

"You think I have made a failure of it?"

"Not at all. You have made everybody furiously uncomfortable, and you see how civil even the Radical papers are to you."

"Yes. What fools!" said Cliffe, shortly. "They'll soon leave that off. Just now I'm a stick to beat the government with. But you don't believe I shall carry my point?"

The point concerned a particular detail in a pending negotiation with the United States. Cliffe had been denouncing the government for what he conceived to be their coming retreat before American demands. America, according to him, had been playing the bully; and English interests were being betrayed.

Mary considered.

"I think you will have to change your tactics."

"Dictate them, then."

He bent forward, with that sudden change of manner, that courteous sweetness of tone and gesture, which few women could resist. Mary's heart, seasoned though it were, felt a charming flutter. She talked, and she talked well. She had no independence of mind, and very little real knowledge; but she had an excellent reporter's ability; she knew what to remember, and how to tell it. Cliffe listened to her attentively, acknowledging to himself the while that she had certainly gained. She was a far more definite personality than she had been when he last knew her; and her self-possession, her trained manner, rested him. Thank Heaven, she was not a clever woman—how he detested the breed! But she was a useful one. And the smiling commonplace into which she fell so often was positively welcome to him. He had known what it was to court a woman who was more than his equal both in mind and passion; and it had left him bitter and broken.

"Well, all this is most illuminating," he said at last. "I owe you immense thanks." And he put out a pair of hands, thin, brown, and weather-stained as his face, and pressed one of hers. "We're very old friends, aren't we?"

"Are we?" said Mary, drawing back.

"So far as any one can be the friend of a chap like me," he said, hastily. "Tell me, are you with Lady Tranmore?"

"No. I go to her in a few days—till I leave London."

"Don't go away," he said, suddenly and insistently. "Don't go away."

Mary could not help a slight wavering in the eyes that perforce met his. Then he said, abruptly, as she rose:

"By-the-way, they tell me Ashe is a great man."

She caught the note of incredulous contempt in his voice and laughed.

"They say he'll be in the cabinet directly."

"And Lady Kitty, I understand, is a scandal to gods and men, and the most fashionable person in town?"

"Oh, not now," said Mary. "That was last year."

"You mean people are tired of her?"

"Well, after a time, you know, a naughty child—"

"Becomes a bore. Is she a bore? I doubt; I very much doubt."

"Go and see," said Mary. "When do you lunch there?"

"I think to-morrow. Shall I find you?"

"Oh no. I am not at all intimate with Lady Kitty."

Cliffe's slight smile, as he followed her into the large drawing-room, died under his mustache. He divined at once the relation between the two, or thought he did.

As for Mary, she caught her last sight of Cliffe, standing bareheaded on the steps of the embassy, his lean distinction, his ugly good looks marking him out from the men around him. Then, as they drove away she was glad that the darkness hid her from Lady Tranmore. For suddenly she could not smile. She was filled with the perception that if Geoffrey Cliffe did not now ask her to marry him, life would utterly lose its savor, its carefully cherished and augmented savor, and youth would abandon her. At the same time she realized that she would have to make a fight of it, with every weapon she could muster.