leave without explaining wherein the difference lay. He
wondered, however, if Clarice's point of view had occurred to Mrs.
Willoughby.

Fielding's visit, and in particular his teasing reticence as to his
stay in Matanga, had the effect of recalling Clarice's thoughts to the
subject of Stephen Drake. She recalled her old impression of him as one
self-centred and self-sufficing, a man to whom nothing outside himself
would make any tangible difference; but she recalled it without a trace
of the apprehension with which it had been previously coupled. She
began indeed to dwell upon that idea of him as upon something restful,
and the idea was still prominent in her mind when, a little more than a
week afterwards, Drake galloped up to her one morning as she was
crossing the Park.

'I have been meaning to call, Mrs. Mallinson,' he said, 'but the fact is,
I have had no time. I only got back from Bentbridge last night.'

Clarice received a sudden and yet expected impression of freshness from
him. 'Papa told me you were going to stand,' she replied. 'You stayed
with my uncle, Captain Le Mesurier, didn't you?'

'Yes. Funnily enough, I have met him before, although I didn't know his
name. He travelled in the carriage with me from Plymouth to London when I
first landed in England.'

Clarice wondered what made him pause for a moment in the middle of the
sentence. 'Your chances are promising?' she asked.

'I can't say yet. I have a Radical lord against me. Burl says there's no
opponent more dangerous. It will be a close fight, I think.' He threw
back his head and opened his chest. His voice rang with a vigorous
enjoyment in the anticipation of a strenuous contest.

'So you are glad to get back to London,' she said.

'Rather. I feel at home here, and only here--even in January.' He looked
across the Park with a laugh. It stretched away vacant and dull in the
gray cheerlessness of a winter's morning. 'The place fascinates me; it
turns me into a child, especially at night. I like the glitter of shops
and gas-lamps, and the throng of people in the light of them. One
understands what the Roman citizen felt. I like driving about the streets
in a hansom. There are some one never gets tired of Oxford Street, for
instance, and the turn out of Leicester Square into Coventry Street, with
the blaze of Piccadilly Circus ahead. One hears that poets starve in
London, and are happy; I can believe it. Well, I am keeping you from the
shops, and