A coalition between the Tories and
certain dissident Liberals had turned out Lord Parham's government in
the course of a stormy autumn session, some eight months before. It had
been succeeded by a weak administration, resting on two or three loosely
knit groups--with Ashe as leader of the Opposition. Hence his
comparative freedom, and the chance to be his mother's escort.

But at Stresa he had been overtaken by some startling political
news--news which seemed to foreshadow an almost immediate change of
ministry; and urgent telegrams bade him return at once. The coalition on
which the government relied had broken down; the resignation of its
chief, a "transient and embarrassed phantom," was imminent; and it was
practically certain, in the singular dearth of older men on his own
side, since the retirement of Lord Parham, that within a few weeks, if
not days, Ashe would be called upon to form an administration....

The carriage was soon on its way again, and presently, in the darkness
of the superb ravine that stretches west and north from Gondo, the
tumult of wind and water was such that even Ashe's slackened pulses felt
the excitement of it. He left the carriage, and, wrapped in a waterproof
cape, breasted the wind along the water's edge. Wordsworth's magnificent
lines in the "Prelude," dedicated to this very spot, came back to him,
as to one who in these later months had been able to renew some of the
literary habits and recollections of earlier years

"--Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light!"

But here on this wild night were only tumult and darkness; and if Nature
in this aspect were still to be held, as Wordsworth makes her, the Voice
and Apocalypse of God, she breathed a power pitiless and terrible to
man. The fierce stream below, the tiny speck made by the carriage and
horses straining against the hurricane of wind, the forests on the
farther bank climbing to endless heights of rain, the flowers in the
rock crannies lashed and torn, the gloom and chill which had thus
blotted out a June evening: all these impressions were impressions of
war, of struggle and attack, of forces unfriendly and overwhelming.

A certain restless and melancholy joy in the challenge of the storm,
indeed, Ashe felt, as many another strong man has felt before him, in a
similar emptiness of heart. But it was because of the mere provocation
of physical energy which it involved; not, as it would have been with
him in youth, bec