Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/958

888 tions of his walk from the House. In spite of her small cordiality, he sat down beside her, wondering with a vicarious compunction at what point her fortunes might be, and how Kitty's proceedings might have already affected them. But he had not yet succeeded in thawing her when a voice behind him said:

"This is my dance, I think, Miss Lyster. Where shall we sit it out?"

Ashe moved at once. Mary looked up, hesitated visibly, then rose and took Geoffrey Cliffe's arm.

"Just read your remarks this evening," said Cliffe to Ashe. "Well, now I suppose to-morrow will see your ship in port?"

For it was reasonably expected that the morrow would see the American Agreement ratified by a substantial ministerial majority.

"Certainly. But you may at least reflect that you have lost us a deal of time."

"And now you slay us," said Cliffe. "Ah! well—'dulce et decorum est,' etcetera."

"Don't imagine that you'll get many of the honors of martyrdom," laughed Ashe,—in Cliffe's eyes an offensive and triumphant figure, as he leant carelessly upon a marble pedestal that carried a bust of Horace Walpole.

"Why?" Cliffe's hand had gone instinctively to his mustache. Mary had dropped his arm, and now stood quietly beside him,—pale and somewhat jaded, her fine eyes travelling between the speakers.

"Why? Because the heresies have no martyrs. The halo is for the true Church!"

"H'm!" said Cliffe, with a reflective sneer. "I suppose you mean for the successful?"

"Do I?" said Ashe, with nonchalance. "Aren't the true Church the people who are justified by the event?"

"The orthodox like to think so," said Cliffe. "But the heretics have a way of coming out top."

"Does that mean you chaps are going to win at the next election? I devoutly hope you may!—we're all as stale as ditch-water,—and as for places, anybody's welcome to mine!" And so saying, Ashe lounged away, attracted by the bow and smile of a pretty Frenchwoman, with whom it was always agreeable to chat.

"Ashe trifles it as usual," said Cliffe, as he and Mary forced a passage into one of the smaller rooms. "Is there anything in the world that he really cares about?"

Mary looked at him with a start. It was almost on her lips to say, "Yes—his wife." She only just succeeded in driving the words back.

"His not caring is a pretence," she said. "At least Lady Tranmore thinks so. She believes that he is becoming absorbed in politics,—much more ambitious than she ever thought he would be."

"That's the way of mothers," said Cliffe, with a sarcastic lip. "They have got to make the best of their sons. Tell me—what you are going to do this summer."

He had thrown one arm round the back of a chair, and sat looking down upon her, his colorless fair hair falling thick upon his brow, and giving by contrast a strange inhuman force to the dark and singular eyes beneath. He had a way of commanding a woman's attention by flashes of brusquerie, melting when he chose into a homage that had in it the note of an older world,—a world that had still leisure for passion and its refinements, a world still within sight of that other which had produced the Carte du tendre. Perhaps it was this, combined with the virilities, not to be questioned, of his aspect, the signs of hard physical endurance in the face burnt by desert suns, and the suggestions of a frame too lean and gaunt for drawing-rooms, that gave him his spell and preserved it.

Mary's conversation with him consisted at first of much cool fencing on her part, which gradually slipped back, as he intended it should, into some of the tones of intimacy. Each meanwhile was conscious of a secret range of thoughts,—hers concerned with the effort and struggle, the bitter disappointments and disillusions, of the past six weeks,—and his with the schemes he had cherished in the East and on the way home of marrying Mary Lyster, or, more correctly, Mary Lyster's money, and so resigning himself to the inevitable boredoms of an English existence. For her the mental horizon was