Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/793

Rh —what a bad temper you had. You would have gone away furious."

"With disappointment—yes," said Cliffe, as he looked at her with an admiration he scarcely endeavored to conceal. Kitty was in black, but a large hat of white tulle, in the most extravagant fashion of the day, made a frame for her hair and eyes, and increased the general lightness and fantasy of her appearance. Cliffe tried to recall her as he had first seen her at Grosville Park, but his recollection of the young girl could not hold its own against the brilliant and emphatic reality before him.

At luncheon it chafed him that he must divide her with the Dean. Yet she was charming with the old man, who chatted history, art, and Paris to her, with a delightful innocence and ignorance of all that made Lady Kitty Ashe the talk of the town, and an old-fashioned deference besides, that insensibly curbed her manner and her phrases as she answered him. Yet when the Dean left her free she returned to Cliffe as though in some sort they two had really been talking all the time, through all the apparent conversation with other people.

"I have read all your telegrams," she said. "Why did you attack William so fiercely?"

Cliffe was taken by surprise, but he felt no embarrassment,—her tone was not that of the wife in arms.

"I attacked the official—not the man. William knows that."

"He is coming in to-day if possible—he wanted to see you."

"Good news! William knows that he would have hit just as hard in my place."

"I don't think he would," said Kitty, calmly. "He is so generous."

The color rushed to Cliffe's face.

"Well scored! I wish I had a wife to play these strokes for me. I shall argue that a keen politician has no right to be generous. He is at war."

Kitty took no notice. She leant her little chin on her hand, and her eyes perused the face of her companion.

"Where have you been—all the time—before America?"

"In the deserts—fighting devils," said Cliffe, after a moment.

"What does that mean?" she asked, wondering.

"Read my new book. That will tell you about the deserts."

"And the devils?"

"Ah!—I keep them to myself."

"Do you?" she said, softly. "I have just read your poems over again."

Cliffe gave a slight start, then looked indifferent.

"Have you? But they were written three years ago. Dieu merci, one finds new devils like new acquaintances."

She shook her head.

"What do you mean?" he asked her, half amused, half arrested.

"They are always the old," she said, in a low voice. Their eyes met. In hers was the same veiled restless melancholy as in his own. Together with the dazzling air of youth that surrounded her, the cherished, flattered, luxurious existence that she and her house suggested, they made a strange impression upon him. "Does she mean me to understand that she is not happy?" he thought to himself. But the next moment she was engaged in a merry chatter with the Dean, and all trace of the mood she had thus momentarily shown him had vanished.

Half-way through the luncheon, Ashe came in. He appeared, fresh and smiling, irreproachably dressed, and showing no trace whatever of the hard morning of official work he had just passed through, nor of the many embarrassments which, as every one knew, were weighing on the Foreign Office. The Dean, with his keen sense for the dramatic, watched the meeting between him and Cliffe with some closeness, having in mind the almost personal duel between the two men—a duel of letters, telegrams, or speeches, which had been lately carried on in the sight of Europe and America. For Ashe now represented the Foreign Office in the House of Commons, and had been much badgered by the Tory extremists who followed Cliffe.

Naturally, being Englishmen, they met as though nothing had happened, and they had parted the day before in Pall Mall. A "Hullo, Ashe!" and "Hullo, Cliffe!—glad to see you back again," completed the matter. The Dean enjoyed it as a specimen of English "phlegm," recalling with amusement a recent visit to Paris—Paris torn between government and opposition, the salons of the one di-