to talk of her straw-plaiting scheme, of the Gairsley
meeting, and of Hallin. But in the middle Marcella unexpectedly said:

"I wish you would tell me, seriously, what reasons you have for not
liking Mr. Wharton?--other than politics, I mean?"

Her black eyes fixed him with a keen insistence.

He was silent a moment with surprise; then he said:

"I had rather not rake up old scores."

She shrugged her shoulders, and he was roused to come and put his arm
round her again, she shrinking and turning her reddened face away.

"Dearest," he said, "you shall put me in charity with all the world. But
the worst of it is," he added, half laughing, "that I don't see how I am
to help disliking him doubly henceforward for having had the luck to put
that fire out instead of me!"

CHAPTER VI.

A few busy and eventful weeks, days never forgotten by Marcella in after
years, passed quickly by. Parliament met in the third week of January.
Ministers, according to universal expectation, found themselves
confronted by a damaging amendment on the Address, and were defeated by
a small majority. A dissolution and appeal to the country followed
immediately, and the meetings and speech-makings, already active
throughout the constituencies, were carried forward with redoubled
energy. In the Tudley End division, Aldous Raeburn was fighting a
somewhat younger opponent of the same country-gentleman stock--a former
fag indeed of his at Eton--whose zeal and fluency gave him plenty to do.
Under ordinary circumstances Aldous would have thrown himself with all
his heart and mind into a contest which involved for him the most
stimulating of possibilities, personal and public. But, as these days
went over, he found his appetite for the struggle flagging, and was
harassed rather than spurred by his adversary's activity. The real truth
was that he could not see enough of Marcella! A curious uncertainty and
unreality, moreover, seemed to have crept into some of their relations;
and it had begun to gall and fever him that Wharton should be staying
there, week after week, beside her, in her father's house, able to
spend all the free intervals of the fight in her society, strengthening
an influence which Raeburn's pride and delicacy had hardly allowed him
as yet, in spite of his instinctive jealousy from the beginning, to take
into his thoughts at all, but which was now apparent, not only to
himself but to others.

In vain did he spend every poss