"Does that mean you chaps are going to win at the next election? I
devoutly hope you may--<i>we</i>'re all as stale as ditch-water--and as for
places, anybody's welcome to mine!" And so saying, Ashe lounged away,
attracted by the bow and smile of a pretty Frenchwoman, with whom it was
always agreeable to chat.

"Ashe trifles it as usual," said Cliffe, as he and Mary forced a passage
into one of the smaller rooms. "Is there anything in the world that he
really cares about?"

Mary looked at him with a start. It was almost on her lips to say, "Yes!
his wife." She only just succeeded in driving the words back.

"His not caring is a pretence," she said. "At least, Lady Tranmore
thinks so. She believes that he is becoming absorbed in politics--much
more ambitious than she ever thought he would be."

"That's the way of mothers," said Cliffe, with a sarcastic lip. "They
have got to make the best of their sons. Tell me what you are going to
do this summer."

He had thrown one arm round the back of a chair, and sat looking down
upon her, his colorless fair hair falling thick upon his brow, and
giving by contrast a strange inhuman force to the dark and singular eyes
beneath. He had a way of commanding a woman's attention by flashes of
brusquerie, melting when he chose into a homage that had in it the note
of an older world, a world that had still leisure for, passion and its
refinements, a world still within sight of that other which had produced
the <i>Carte du tendre</i>. Perhaps it was this, combined with the
virilities, not to be questioned, of his aspect, the signs of hard
physical endurance in the face burned by desert suns, and the
suggestions of a frame too lean and gaunt for drawing-rooms, that gave
him his spell and preserved it.

Mary's conversation with him consisted at first of much cool fencing on
her part, which gradually slipped back, as he intended it should, into
some of the tones of intimacy. Each meanwhile was conscious of a secret
range of thoughts--hers concerned with the effort and struggle, the
bitter disappointments and disillusions of the past six weeks; and his
with the schemes he had cherished in the East and on the way home, of
marrying Mary Lyster, or more correctly, Mary Lyster's money, and so
resigning himself to the inevitable boredoms of an English existence.
For her the mental horizon was full of Kitty--Kitty insolent,
Kitty triumphant. For him, too, Kitty made the background of
thought