did. That public house on the river, with its kitchen garden, still

rankled. "You know, John," said Mrs. Breezy suddenly, "I've been thinking it all over. We were wrong to suppose that Lola would ever have married a man like Simpkins."

"Why? He's a good fellow, respectable, clean-minded, thinks a good deal of himself and has a nice bit of money stowed away. You don't want her to become engaged to one of these young fly-by-nights round here, do you,--little clerks who spend all their spare money on clothes, have no ambition, no education and want to get as much as they can for nothing?"

"No," said Mrs. Breezy. "I certainly do not, though I don't think it matters what you and I want, my dear. I've come to the conclusion that Lola knows what she's going to do, and we couldn't make her alter her mind if we went down on our knees to her."

Breezy was profoundly interested. Many times he had discovered that the little woman who professed to be nothing but a housewife, and very rarely gave forth any definite opinions of her own, said things from time to time which almost blew the roof off the shop. She was possessed of an uncanny intuition, what he regarded almost as second sight, and when she was in that mood he squashed his own egotism and listened to her with his mouth open.

So she went on undisturbed. "What I think is that Lola means to aim high. I've worked it out in my mind that she got into the house in Dover Street to learn enough to rise above such men as Simpkins and Ernest Treadwell, so that she could fit herself to marry a gentleman. And I think she's right. Look at her. Look at those little ankles and wrists and the daintiness of her in every way. She's not Queen's Road, Bayswater, and never was. She's Mayfair from head to foot, mind and body. We're just accidents in her life, you and I, John, my dear. She will be a great lady, you mark my words."

Breezy didn't altogether like being called an accident. He took a good deal of credit for the fact that Lola was Mayfair, as Emily called it, rather well. And he said so, and added, "How about the old de Breze blood? You forget that, my being a little jeweler in a small shop. She's thrown back, that's what she's done, and I'll tell you what it is, missus. She won't be ashamed of us, whoever she marries. _She_ doesn't look upon us as accidents, whatever you may do, and if some man who's A 1 at Lloyd's falls in love with her and makes her his wife, her old father and mother will be drawn up the ladder after her, if I know anything about Lola. But it's a dream, just a dream," hoping that it wasn't, and only saying so as a sort of insurance against bad luck. It was a new idea and an exciting one, which put that place on the Thames into the discard. Personally he had hitherto regarded the Simpkins proposal in a very favorable light. That little man had more money than he himself could ever make, and, after all, a highly respectable public house on the upper Thames, patronized by really nice people, had been, in his estimation, something not to be sneezed at, by any means.

"Well," said Mrs. Breezy, "you may call it a dream. I don't. Lola thinks things out. She's always thought things out. She became a lady's maid for a purpose. When she's finished with that, she'll move on to something else. I don't know what, because she keeps things to herself. But she knows more than you and I will ever know. I've noticed that often. And when she was here on Sunday, and we walked about the streets, she was no more Lola Breezy than Lady Feo is, and there was something in the way she laid the dinner and insisted on waiting on us which showed me that she knew she wasn't. She was what country people call 'fey' that night. Her body was with us, but her brain and heart and spirit were far out of our reach. I'm certain of that, John, and I'm certain of something else, too. She's in love, and she knows her man, and he's a big man, and very soon she'll have a surprise for us, and it will _be_ a surprise. You mark my words."

And when she got up to answer the tinkle of the bell on the shop door, she left the fat John Breezy quivering with excitement and a sort of awe. Emily was not much of a talker, but when she started she said more in two minutes than other women say in a week. And after he had told himself how good it would be for his little girl to win great happiness, he put both his pale hands on the table, and heaved a tremendous sigh. "Oh, my God," he said. "And if she could help us to get out of this shop, never to see a watch again, to be no longer the slave of that damned little bell, to go away and live in the country, and grow things, and listen to the birds, and watch the sunsets."

VII

At that moment George Lytham drove his car through the gates of Chilton Park and up to the old house. He asked for Mr. Fallaray, was shown into the library and paced up and down the room with his hands deep in his pockets, but with his chin high, his eyes gleaming and a curious smile about his mouth.

The moment had come for which he had been waiting since the Armistice, for which he had been working with all his energy since he had got back into civilian clothes. He had left London and driven down to Whitecross on a wave of exhilaration. There had been a meeting at his office at which all the men of his party had been present,--young men, ex-soldiers and sailors temporarily commissioned, who had come out of the great catastrophe to look things straight in the face. "Fallaray is our man," they had all said unanimously. "Where is he?" And Lytham, who was his friend, had been sent to fetch him and bring him back to London that night. The time was ripe for action.

But when the door opened and Fallaray strolled in--he had never seen him stroll before--George drew up short, amazed.--But this was not Fallaray. This was not the man he had seen the previous Friday with rounded shoulders, haggard face and eyes in the back of his head. Here was one who looked like a younger brother of Fallaray, a care-free younger brother, sun-tanned, irresponsible, playing with life.

"My dear Fallaray," he said, hardly knowing what to say, "what have you done to yourself?"

And Fallaray sent out a ringing laugh and clapped young Lochinvar on the shoulder. "You notice the change, eh? It's wonderful, wonderful. I say to myself all day long how wonderful it is." And he flung his hands up and laughed again and threw himself into a chair and stuck his long legs out. "But what the devil do you want?" he asked lightly, enjoying the opportunity of showing the serious man who came out of a future that he himself had forgotten that he was beginning to revel in his past. "I said that some one would jolly soon see the wreckage on the shore of my Eden and send out a rescue party, and here you are."

Lytham didn't understand. The words were Greek to him and the attitude so surprising that it awakened in him a sort of irritation. Good God, hadn't this man, who meant so much to them, read the papers? Wasn't he aware of the fact that the time had arrived in the history of politics when a strong concerted effort might put a new face upon everything? "Look here, Fallaray," he said, "let's talk sense."

"My dear chap," said Fallaray, "you've come to the wrong man for that. I know nothing about sense, and what's more, I don't want to. Talk romance to me, quote poetry, tell me your dreams, turn somersaults, but don't come here and expect any sense from me. I've given it up."

But Lytham was not to be put off. He said to himself, "The air of this place has gone to Fallaray's head. He needed a holiday. The reaction has played a trick upon him. He's pulling my leg." He drew up a chair and leaned forward eagerly and put his hand on Fallaray's knee. "All right, old boy," he said. "Have your joke, but come down from the ether in which you're floating and listen to facts. The wily little P. M. who's been between the devil and the deep sea for a couple of years is getting rattled. With the capitalists pushing him one way and the labor leaders shouldering him the other, he's losing his feet. The by-elections show the way the wind's blowing in the country and they've made a draught in Downing Street. Trust a Celt as a political barometer."

"There's been no wind here, George," said Fallaray, putting his hands behind his head. "Golden days, my dear fellow, golden days, with the gentlest of breezes."

But Lytham ignored the interruption. In five minutes, if he knew his man, he would have Fallaray sitting up straight. "Our anti-waste men are winning every seat they stand for," he went on, "and this means the nucleus of a new party, our party. The country is behind us, Fallaray, and if we keep our heads and get down to work, the next general election will not be a walk-over for the labor men but for us. Lloyd George is on his last legs, in spite of his newspapers, and with him the Coalitionists disappear to a man. As for Trades-Unionism, the coal strike has proved that it oscillates between communism and socialism, the nationalizing of everything--mines, railways, land, capital--and the country doesn't like it and isn't ready for it. The way, therefore, is easy if we organize at once under a leader who has won the reputation for honesty, and that leader is yourself. But there is not a moment to waste. My car is outside. Drive up with me now and meet us to-morrow morning. Unanimously we look to you." He sprang to his feet and made a gesture towards the door.

But Fallaray settled more comfortably into his chair and crossed one long leg over the other. "Do you know your Hood?" he asked.

"Hood?--Why?"

"Listen to this:

"'Peace and rest at length have come, All the day's long toil is past, And each heart is whispering Home, Home at last.'"

"But what has that got to do with it?"

"That's my answer to you, George." And Fallaray waved his hand, as though the question was settled.

If Lytham had been older or younger, and if his admiration and esteem for Fallaray had not become so deep-rooted, he must have broken out into a torrent of incredulity and impatience. What he did, instead, persuading himself, easily enough, that his friend had not recovered from his recent disappointments, although he had obviously benefited in health, was to go over the whole ground again, more quietly and in greater detail, and to wind up with the assertion that Fallaray was essential to the cause.

To all of which Fallaray listened with a sort of respectful interest but without the slightest enthusiasm, and remained lolling in his chair. He might have been a Buckinghamshire Squire who knew no language but his own, hearing a Frenchman holding forth for no apparent reason on Napoleon. He watched his friend's mouth, appraised his occasional gestures, ran his eyes with liking over his well-knit body and found his voice pleasant to the ear. Beyond that, nothing.

Lytham began to feel like a man who throws stones into a lake. All his points seemed to disappear into an unruffled and indifferent surface of water. It was incomprehensible. It was also indescribably baffling. What on earth had come over this man who, until a few days before, had been burning with a desire to reconstruct and working himself into a condition of nervous exhaustion in an endeavor to pull his country out of chaos?

"Well," he said, after an extraordinary pause, during which everything seemed to have fallen flat. "What are you going to do?"

"But I've told you, my dear George," said Fallaray, with a long sigh of happiness. "I have found a home, at last."

"You mean that you are going to let us down?"

"I mean that I am going to live my own life."

"That you're out of politics?"

"Yes. My resignation goes in to-morrow."

"My God! Why?"

Fallaray got up and went to the window. He stood for a moment looking out at a corner of the terrace where several steps led down to a fountain in which, out of an urn held in the hands of a weather-worn boy, water was flowing, colored like a rainbow by the evening sun.

And Lytham followed him, wondering whether he had gone off his head, become feeble-minded as the result of overstrain. And then he saw Lola sitting on the edge of the fountain, with her face tilted up, her hands clasped round one of her knees and her golden hair gleaming.

And there both men remained, gazing,--Fallaray with a smile of possession, of infinite pride and pleasure; Lytham with an expression of profound amazement and quick understanding.

"So it's a woman," he thought. And as he continued to look, another picture of that girl came back into his mind. He had seen her before. He had turned as she had passed him somewhere and caught his breath. He remembered to have said to himself as she had walked away, "Eve, come to life! Some poor devil of an Adam will go to hell for her."--The Carlton--Chalfont--the foyer with its little cases of glittering jewels, the long strip of carpet leading to the stairs of the dining room--the palms--the orchestra. It all came back.--Well, this might be a form of madness in a man of Fallaray's age and womanless life, but, thank God, it was one with which he could deal. It was physical, not mental, as he had feared. Fallaray might very well play Adam without going into hell.

"Can't you combine the two," he said. "Politics and that girl? It's been done before. It's being done every day. The one is helped by the other."

But Fallaray shook his head. "I am not going to do it," he said. "I have had a surfeit of one and nothing of the other. Take it from me finally, George,--I am out of the political game. I think I should have been out of it in any case, because I came here acknowledging failure, fed up, nauseated. I am not the man to juggle with intrigues, to say one thing to placate the capitalists to-day and another to fool labor to-morrow. It isn't my way and I shall not be missed. On the contrary, my resignation will be accepted with eagerness. I am going to begin all over again, free, perfectly firm in my belief that there are better men to do my job. I was a bull in a china shop, and it will remain a china shop, whether it's run by one party or another. It's the system. Nothing can alter it. I couldn't, you and your party won't be able to. It's gone too far. It's a cancer. It will kill the country. And so I'm out. I consider that I have earned the right to love and make a home. Row off from my Eden, my dear fellow, and leave me in peace. I am not going to be rescued."

"We'll see about that," thought Lytham. "This is not Fallaray who speaks. It's the man of forty suddenly hit by passion. I'll fight that girl to the last gasp. We must have this man, we _must_."

He turned away, deeply disappointed at the queer tangent at which his chief had gone off, bitterly annoyed to find that here was a fight within a fight at a time when unity was vital. He was himself a perfectly normal creature who regarded the rustle of silk as one of the necessities, like golf and tobacco, but to sacrifice a career or let down a cause for the sake of a woman was to him an act of unimaginable weakness and folly. If only Fallaray had been younger or older, or, better still, had been contentedly married to Feo! Cursed bad luck that he had been caught at forty.--But, struck with an idea in which he could see immediate possibilities, he stopped on his way to the door and went back to Fallaray. To work it out in his usual energetic way he must use strategy and appear to accept his friend's decision as irreparable. "All right," he said. "You know best. I'll argue no more. But as there's no need now for me to dash back to town, mayn't I linger with you in Arcadia for a couple of hours?"

Fallaray was delighted. Lola was to dine at Lady Cheyne's, and he would be alone. It would be very jolly to have George to dinner, especially as he saw the futility of argument and recognized an ultimatum. "Stay and have some food," he said. "I've much to tell you. But will you let me leave you for ten minutes?"

That was precisely what young Lochinvar intended to do before he drove away,--speak to that woman.

He watched Fallaray join Lola at the fountain, give her his hand and wander off among the rose trees, wearing what he called the fatuous smile of the middle-aged man in love. And then, so that he might obtain a point or two for future use, he rang the bell for Elmer. The butler and he had known each other for years. He would answer a few nonchalant questions without reserve. "Good afternoon, Elmer," he said, when the old man came in.

"Good afternoon to you, Sir." He might have been an actor who in palmy days had played Hamlet at Bristol.

"I'm staying to an early dinner with Mr. Fallaray. A whiskey and soda would go down rather well in the meantime."

"Certainly, Sir."

"Oh, and Elmer."

"Sir?" His turn and the respectful familiar angle of his head were only possible to actors of the good old school.

"The name of the charming lady who has so kindly helped to brighten up Mr. Fallaray's week-end."

"Madame de Breze, Sir."

"Oh, yes, of course." He had never heard it before. Married then, or a widow. French. 'Um. "And she is staying with----"

"Lady Cheyne, Sir."

"Oh, yes,--that house----"

"A stone's throw from the gate in the wall, Sir. You can see the roof from this window."

"Thanks very much, Elmer. How's your son getting on now?"

"Very well indeed, Sir, thank you, owing to your kindness."

"A very good fellow,--a first-rate soldier. One of our best junior officers. Not too much soda, then."

"No, Sir." He left the room like an elderly sun-beam.

"Good!" said George Lytham. "Get off early, hang about by the gate, intercept this young woman on her way back to Fallaray and see what her game is. That's the idea."

And he sat down, lit a cigarette and picked up a copy of Hood that lay open on the table. His eyes fell on some marked lines.

"Peace and rest at length have come, All the day's long toil is past, And each heart is whispering Home, Home at last."

And he thought of Feo whom he had seen several nights running with Arrowsmith and before that, for a series of years, with Dick, Tom and Harry. Never with Fallaray.

"Poor devil," he thought. "He's been too long without it. It won't be easy to rescue him now."

VIII

And at the gate in the wall Fallaray held Lola close in his arms and kissed her, again and again.

"My little Lola," he said softly, "how wonderful you are,--how wonderful all this is. You had been in the air all round me for weeks. I used to see your eyes among the stars looking down at me when I left the House. I used to wake at night and feel them upon me all warm about my heart. Lots of times, like the wings of a bird, they flashed between me and my work. And the tingle of your hand that never left me ran through my veins like fire. I could have stopped dead that night at the Savoy and followed you away. And when I found you weeping in the corridor in Dover Street I was confused and bewildered because then I was old and I was fighting against you for the cause. De Breze, de Breze,--the name used to come to me, suddenly, like the forerunner of rain to a dried-up plant. And at last I got away and came down here, as I know now, to throw off my useless years and go back, past all the milestones on a long road, and wait for you. And then you heard my cry and opened the gate and walked among those stone figures of my life and gave me back my youth."

"With love and adoration and long-deferred hope," she said and crept closer to his heart. "I love you. I love you. I've always loved you. And if I'd never found you, I should have waited for you on the other side of the Bridge,--loving you still."

"My dear--who am I to deserve this?"

"You are Fallaray. Who else?"

And he laughed at that and held up her face and kissed her lips and said, "No. I'm no longer Fallaray, that husk of a man, emptying his energy on the ribs of chaos. I'm Edmund the boy, transformed to adolescence. I'm Any Man in love."

And again she went closer, feeling the far-off shudder of thunder, with a new-born fear of opening the gate in the wall. "Who was that man who came to see you?"

"Young Lochinvar,--Lytham. He's interested in politics."

"What did he want to see you about?"

"Nothing." And he brushed away the lingering recollection with his hand.

"No. Tell me. I want to know."

"I forget." And he laughed and kissed her once again.

"But in any case you have to go back to-morrow?"

He shook his head and ran his fingers over her hair.

"But you said you'd have to,--that night."

"Did I? I forget." And he put his hand over her heart and held it there.

And again there came that thunder shudder, and she eyed the gate with fear. "Did he want you to go back to-night? Tell me; I've _got_ to know." And she drew away a little--a very little--in order to force her point.

But he drew her back and kissed her eyes. "Don't look like that," he said. "What's it matter? Let him want. I'm not going back. I'm never going back. If George Lytham were multiplied by a hundred thousand and they all landed on my island with grappling irons, I'd laugh them back to sea. They shan't have me. I've given them all I had. I've found my youth and I'll enjoy it, here, anywhere, with you." He stretched out and opened the gate. "And now, I must let you go, my sweet. But don't be longer than you can help. Get dinner over quickly and come back to me again. Wear that silver frock and I'll wait for you on the terrace, as I did before. I want to be surprised again as you shimmer among those cold stones." He let her go.

And she went through the gate and stood irresolute, as the shudder came again. With a little cry she turned and flung her arms round his neck as though she were saying, "Good-by."

And yet there was only a cloud as big as a man's hand in that clear sky.

IX

No one, it might be thought, could hear to think at the narrow table in Lady Cheyne's house. Those natural, childlike creatures who, if they had ever learned the artificialities forget them, talked, argued, sang and screamed each other down all at the same time. They could not really be musicians if they didn't.

Zalouhou, whose only preparations for dinner consisted in bushing out his tie and hair, sat at his hostess' left; Willy Pouff, in an evening suit borrowed from a waiter friend who had gone to a hospital with a poisoned hand, on her right. Lola, at the end of the table, sat between Valdemar Varvascho and Max Wachevsky, who had remembered, oddly enough, to wash their faces, though Varvascho's beard had grown darkly during the day. Both the women had changed and made up for artificial light. The result of Anna Stezzel's hour was remarkable, as well, perhaps, as somewhat disconcerting. A voluptuous person, with hair as black as a wet starling, she had plastered her face with a thick coating of white stuff on which her lips resembled blood stains in the snow. Her beaded evening gown saved the company from panic merely by an accident and disclosed also the whole wide expanse of a rather yellow back. Regina Spatz was built on Zuluesque lines, too, but more by luck than judgment a white blouse tempered her amazing ampleness. She had used henna on her hair so that it might have been fungus in a tropic sea and sat in a perpetual blush of indiscriminate rouge. Salo Impf was wedged against her side and looked like a Hudson River tugboat under the lee of the _Aquitania_.

Like all fat women, Lady Cheyne was devoted to eating and had long since decided to let herself go. "One can only live once," she said, in self-defense; "and how does one know that there'll be peas and potatoes in the next world." The dinner, to the loudly expressed satisfaction of the musicians, was substantial and excellent. Each course was received with a volley of welcome, expressed in several languages. The hard exercise of singing, playing, gesticulating, praising and breathing deeply gave these children of the exuberant Muse the best of appetites. It was a shattering meal.

But Lola could hear herself think, for all that. She sat smiling and nodding. Her body went through the proper mechanics, but her spirit was outside the gate in the wall, trembling. There was a cloud in the sky, already. Fallaray was going to make her more important than his work, and she had not come to him for that. Her metier was to bring into his loveless life the rustle of silk,--love, tenderness, flattery, refreshment, softness, beauty, laughter, adoration, which would send him out of her secret nest strengthened, humanized, eager, optimistic. She must fail lamentably if the effect of her absorbed him to the elimination of everything that made him necessary to the man who had come from London and to all that he represented. George Lytham, of _Reconstruction_, the organizer of the Anti-waste Party,--she had heard him discussed by Lady Feo. Without Fallaray he might be left leaderless,--because of her.

She went upstairs as soon as she could to put on the silver frock. There had been no time to change before dinner. Fallaray had kissed her so often that she had been late. She was joined immediately by Lady, Cheyne, who was anxious. She had seen something in Lola's eyes.

"What is it, my dear?" she asked. "I'm worried about you."

And Lola went to her, as to a mother, and shut her eyes and gave a little cry that seemed to come from her soul.

"There's something wrong!--Has he hurt you? Tell me."

And Lola said, "Oh, no. He would never hurt me, never. He loves me. But I may be hurting him, and that's so very much worse."

"I don't understand. You mean--his reputation? But what if you are? We're all too precious careful to guard the reputations of our politicians, to help them along in their petty careers."

"But he isn't a politician, and he isn't working for a career." She drew away sharply. No one must have a word against Fallaray.

"Well, what is it then? I want you to be happy. I want this to be a Great Romance. And, good Heavens, my darling, it's only three days old."

Lola spoke through tears. Yes, it was only three days old. "He may love me too much," she said. "I may become more important than his work."

Lady Cheyne's anxiety left her, like smoke. And she gave a laugh and drew what she called that old-fashioned child into her arms again. "My dear," she said, "don't let _that_ distress you. Make yourself more important than his work. Encourage him to love you more than himself. He'll be different from most men if he is capable of that! But perhaps happiness is something new in his life, and I shouldn't wonder, with Lady Feo for a wife."

It never occurred to Lola to ask her friend how she had discovered the secret. She listened eagerly to her sophistries, trying to persuade herself that they were true.

"Get him to take you away. There are beautiful places to go to, and he never will be missed. There'll be a paragraph,--'ill-health causes the resignation of Mr. Fallaray'; the clubs will talk, but the people will believe the papers, and presently Lady Feo will sue for divorce, desertion. A nice thing,--she being the deserter! And you and he,--what do you care? Is happiness so cheap that you can throw it away, either of you? If he loves you, _that's_ his career, and a very much better one than leading parties and making empty promises and becoming Prime Minister. If he loves you well enough to sacrifice all that, for the sake of womanhood see that he does it, and you will build a bigger statue for him than any that he could win."

And she kissed her little de Breze, who seemed to have undergone a perfectly natural _crise de neuf_, being so much in love, and patted her on the shoulder. "Take an old woman's advice, my pet. If you've won that man, keep him. He'll live to thank you for it one of these days."

And finally, when Lola slipped into the twilight in her silver frock, there didn't seem to be a single cloud in the sky. Only an evening star. What Lady Cheyne had said she believed because she wanted to believe it, because this Great Romance was only three days old and hope had been so long deferred.--She stopped in the old garden and picked a rose and pulled its thorns off so that she might give it to Fallaray, and she lingered for a moment taking in the scents and the quiet sounds of that most lovely evening,--more lovely and more unclouded even than that other one, which was locked in her memory. And then she went along the path through the corner of a wood. A rabbit disappeared into the undergrowth, but the fairies were not out yet, and there was no one to spy. Was happiness so cheap that she could throw it away,--his and her own? "If you've won that man, keep him." She danced all the rest of the way and over the side road to the gate in the wall,--early, after all, by half an hour. She would wait outside until she heard Fallaray's quick step and watch the star. "I'll get him to take me away," she thought. "There are beautiful places to go to, and he never will be missed."

She turned quickly, hearing some one on the road. She saw a car drawn up a little distance away, and a man come swinging towards her.

It was young Lochinvar.

X

"Madame de Breze," he said, standing bareheaded, "my name is Lytham. May I ask you to be so kind as to give me ten minutes?"

"Twenty," she answered, with the smile that she had flashed at Chalfont that night at the Savoy. "I have just that much to spare."

"Thank you." But now that he was there, after all his strategy, after saying good-by to Fallaray, driving all the way down the hill from Whitecross and up again into that side road, he didn't know how to begin, or where. This girl! God,--how disordering a quality of sex! No wonder she had shattered poor old Fallaray.

"Shall we walk along the lane? It turns a little way up and you can see the cross cut in the hill."

"Yes," he said. "But there are so many crosses, aren't there, and they're all cut on somebody's hill." He saw that she looked at him sharply and was glad. Quick to take points, evidently. This interview would not be quite so difficult, after all.

"You came down from town to see Edmund?" She called him by his Christian name to show this man where he stood.

"On the most urgent business," he said, "I saw you sitting at the side of the fountain. It's a dear old place."

She was not beautiful, and she was not sophisticated. That way of dragging in Fallaray's Christian name was childish in its naivete. But all about her there was something so fresh and young, so sublimely unselfconscious, so disturbingly feminine, so appealing in its essence of womanhood that he had to pay her tribute and measure his words. He would hate to hurt this girl. De Breze--Madame de Breze--how was it that he hadn't heard of her before? She knew Chalfont. She was staying with Poppy Cheyne. Fallaray had met her somewhere. Odd that he had missed her in the crowd.

"I'll come to the point, if I may," he said. "And I must bore you a little with a disquisition on the state of affairs."

"I'm interested in politics," she said, with a forlorn attempt to keep a high head.

"Then perhaps you know what's happened, to a certain extent, although probably not as much as those of us who stand in the wings of the political stage and see the actors without their make-up,--not a pretty sight, sometimes."

"Well?" But the cloud had returned and blotted out the evening star, and there was the shudder of distant thunder again.

"Well, the people are turning against the old gang, at last. The Prime Minister has only his favorites and parasites and newspapers left with him. The Unionists are scared stiff by the sudden uprising of the Anti-waste Party and Labor has been drained of its fighting funds. The Liberals have withered. There is one great cry for honest government, relief from crushing taxation, a fair reward for hard work, and new leadership that will make the future safe from new wars. We must have Fallaray. He's the only man. I came here this evening to fetch him. He refuses to come because of you. What are you going to do?"

As he drew up short and faced her, she looked like a deer surrounded by dogs. He was sorry, but this was no time for fooling. What stuff was this girl made of? Had she the gift of self-sacrifice as well as the magnetism of sex? Or was she just a female, who would cling to what she had won, self before everything?

"I love him," she said.

Well, it was good to know that, but was that an answer? "Yes," he said. "Well?" He would like to have added "But does he love you and can you keep him after passion is dead,--a man like Fallaray, who, after all, is forty." But he hadn't the courage or the desire to hurt.

"And because I love him he must go," she said.

He leaned forward and seized her hand. He was surprised, delighted, and a little awed. She had gone as white as a lily. "You will see to that? You will use all your influence to give him back to us?" He could hardly believe his ears and his eyes.

"All my influence," she said, standing very straight.

He bent down and touched her hand with his lips.

They were at the gate. They heard steps on the other side of the wall.

"Go," she said, "quickly."

But before he went he bowed, as to a queen.

And then Lola heard the voice again, harshly. "Go on, de Breze, go on. Don't be weak. Stick to your guns. You have him in the palm of your hand."

But she shook her head. "But I'm not de Breze. I've only tried to be. I'm Lola Breezy of Queen's Road, Bayswater, and this is love."

She opened the gate and went in to Fallaray.