Page:In the days of the comet.djvu/299

 and life is gone from me." Then for a long time he sat still. There was a Carton, the Lord Chancellor, a white-faced man with understanding; he had a heavy, shaven face that might have stood among the busts of the Cæsars, a slow, elaborating voice, with self-indulgent, slightly oblique, and triumphant lips, and a momentary, voluntary, humorous twinkle. "We have to forgive," he said. "We have to forgive--even ourselves."

These two were at the top corner of the table, so that I saw their faces well. Madgett, the Home Secretary, a smaller man with wrinkled eyebrows, and a frozen smile on his thin wry mouth, came next to Carton; he contributed little to the discussion save intelligent comments, and when the electric lights above glowed out, the shadows deepened queerly in his eye-sockets and gave him the quizzical expression of an ironical goblin. Next him was that great peer, the Earl of Richover, whose self-indulgent indolence had accepted the rôle of a twentieth-century British-Roman patrician of culture, who had divided his time almost equally between his jockeys, politics, and the composition of literary studies in the key of his rôle. "We have done nothing worth doing," he said. "As for me, I have cut a figure!" He reflected--no doubt on his ample patrician years, on the fine great houses that had been his setting, the teeming racecourses