Borrowdean felt nerved to his enterprise.

"Let us go somewhere and sit down for a few minutes," he suggested. "The
rooms are so hot this evening."

She assented without words, and he found a solitary couch in one of the
further apartments.

"I wonder," he said, after a moment's pause, "whether I might say
something to you, whether you would listen to me for a few minutes."

Berenice was absorbed in her own thoughts. She allowed him to proceed.

"For a good many years," he said, lowering his voice a little, "I have
worked hard and done all I could to be successful. I wanted to have some
sort of a position to offer. I am a Cabinet Minister now, and although I
don't suppose we can last much longer this time, I shall have a place
whenever we are in again."

The sense of what he was saying began to dawn upon her. She stopped him
at once.

"Please do not say any more, Sir Leslie," she begged. "I should have
given you credit for sufficient perception to have known beforehand the
absolute impossibility of--of anything of the sort."

"You are still a young woman," he said, quietly. "The world expects you
to marry again."

"I have no interest in what the world expects of me," she answered, "but
I may tell you at once that my refusal has nothing whatever to do with
the question of marriage in the abstract. You are a man of perception,
Sir Leslie! It will be, I trust, sufficient if I say that I have no
feelings whatever towards you which would induce me to consider the
subject even for a moment."

She was unchanged, then! This time he recognized the note of finality
in her tone. All the time and thought he had given to this matter were
wasted. He had failed, and he knew why. He seldom permitted himself the
luxury of anger, but he felt all the poison of bitter hatred stirring
within him at that moment, and craving for some sort of expression. There
was nothing he could do, nothing he could say. But if Mannering had been
within reach then he would have struck him. He rose and walked slowly
away.

CHAPTER II

HESTER THINKS IT "A GREAT PITY"

"You will understand," Mannering said, as the brougham drove off, "that
you and I are speaking together merely as friends. I have nothing
official to say to you. It would be presumption on my part to assume that
the time is ripe for anything definite while you are still at the head of
an unbeaten Government. But one learns to read the signs of the times.
I think that yo