here,
and every now and then taking up a volume of Hansard that lay near that
he might verify a quotation.

An old county member, with a rugged face and eye-glasses, who had been
in Parliament for a generation, came to the same corner to look up a
speech. He glanced curiously at Wharton, with whom he had a familiar
House-of-Commons acquaintance.

"Nervous, eh?" he said, as he put on his eye-glasses to inspect first
Wharton, then the dates on the backs of the Reports.

Wharton put his papers finally together, and gave a long stretch.

"Not particularly."

"Well, it's a beastly audience!" said the other, carrying off his book.

Wharton, lost apparently in contemplation of the ceiling, fell into a
dreamy attitude. But his eye saw nothing of the ceiling, and was not at
all dreamy. He was not thinking of his speech, nor of the other man's
remark. He was thinking of Marcella Boyce.

When he left her the other day he had been conscious, only more vividly
and intensely, more possessively as it were, than she, of the same
general impression that had been left upon her. A new opening for
pleasure--their meeting presented itself to him, too, in the same way.
What had he been about all this time? _Forget_?--such a creature? Why,
it was the merest wantonness! As if such women--with such a brow, such
vitality, such a gait--passed in every street!

What possessed him now was an imperious eagerness to push the matter, to
recover the old intimacy--and as to what might come out of it, let the
gods decide! He could have had but a very raw appreciation of her at
Mellor. It seemed to him that she had never forced him to think of her
then in absence, as he had thought of her since the last meeting.

As for the nursing business, and the settlement in Brown's Buildings, it
was, of course, mere play-acting. No doubt when she emerged she would be
all the more of a personage for having done it. But she must emerge
soon. To rule and shine was as much her _metier_ as it was the _metier_
of a bricklayer's labourer to carry hods. By George! what would not Lady
Selina give for beauty of such degree and kind as that! They must be
brought together. He already foresaw that the man who should launch
Marcella Boyce in London would play a stroke for himself as well as for
her. And she must be launched in London. Let other people nurse, and
pitch their tents in little workmen's flats, and _live_ democracy
instead of preaching it. Her fate was fixed