no wet clothes clinging to her limbs, gave her the joy of a
child doing a naughty thing. She swam out of her depth, then scared at
her own adventure, swam in again as the sun rose.

She dashed into her two garments, climbed the wall, and scurried back to
the house. All her dejection, and feverish uncertainty were gone; she
felt keen, fresh, terribly hungry, and stealing into the dark
dining-room, began rummaging for food. She found biscuits, and was still
munching, when in the open doorway she saw Lord Dennis, a pistol in one
hand and a lighted candle in the other. With his carved features and
white beard above an old blue dressing-gown, he looked impressive, having
at the moment a distinct resemblance to Lady Casterley, as though danger
had armoured him in steel.

"You call this resting!" he said, dryly; then, looking at her drowned
hair, added: "I see you have already entrusted your trouble to the waters
of Lethe."

But without answer Barbara vanished into the dim hall and up the stairs.

CHAPTER IV

While Barbara was swimming to meet the dawn, Miltoun was bathing in those
waters of mansuetude and truth which roll from wall to wall in the
British House of Commons.

In that long debate on the Land question, for which he had waited to make
his first speech, he had already risen nine times without catching the
Speaker's eye, and slowly a sense of unreality was creeping over him.
Surely this great Chamber, where without end rose the small sound of a
single human voice, and queer mechanical bursts of approbation and
resentment, did not exist at all but as a gigantic fancy of his own! And
all these figures were figments of his brain! And when he at last spoke,
it would be himself alone that he addressed! The torpid air tainted with
human breath, the unwinking stare of the countless lights, the long rows
of seats, the queer distant rounds of pale listening flesh perched up so
high, they were all emanations of himself! Even the coming and going in
the gangway was but the coming and going of little wilful parts of him!
And rustling deep down in this Titanic creature of his fancy was 'the
murmuration' of his own unspoken speech, sweeping away the puff balls of
words flung up by that far-away, small, varying voice.

Then, suddenly all that dream creature had vanished; he was on his feet,
with a thumping heart, speaking.

Soon he had no tremors, only a dim consciousness that his words sounded
strange, and a