Page:Terminations (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1895).djvu/115

Rh of other gifts. She asked me if I called virtue a gift—as if it were handed to us in a parcel on our birthday; and I declared that this very enquiry showed me the problem had already caught her by the skirt. She would have help, however—help that I myself had once had, in resisting its tendency to make one cross.

"What help do you mean?"

"That of the member for Clockborough."

She stared, smiled, then exclaimed; "Why, my idea has been to help him!"

She had helped him—I had his own word for it that at Clockborough her bedevilment of the voters had really put him in. She would do so doubtless again and again, but I heard the very next month that this fine faculty had undergone a temporary eclipse. News of the catastrophe first came to me from Mrs. Saltram, and it was afterward confirmed at Wimbledon; poor Miss Anvoy was in trouble—great disasters in America had suddenly summoned her home. Her father, in New York, had had reverses—lost so much money that it was really provoking as showing how much he had had. It was Adelaide who told me that she had gone off alone at less than a week's notice.

"Alone? Gravener has permitted that?"

"What will you have? The House of Commons!"

I'm afraid I cursed the House of Commons; I was so much interested. Of course he would follow her as soon as he was free to make her his