sia,
surely she could be found?"

Nora rested her head upon her fingers. She seemed to be watching
intently the dancing flames. Her broad, womanly forehead was troubled,
her soft brown eyes pensive.

"He is fifty years old," she said. "It is rather an anomalous age. At
fifty a man's taste is almost hypercritical and his attraction to my sex
is on the wane. No, the problem isn't so easy."

Dartrey had finished tea and was feeling for his cigarette case.

"I rather fancied, Nora, that he was attracted by you."

"Well, he isn't, then," she replied, with a smile.

"He was rather by way of thinking that he was, the other night, but that
was simply because he was in a curiously unsettled state and he felt
that I was sympathetic."

"You are a very clever woman, Nora," he said, looking across at her.
"You could make him care for you if you chose."

"Is that to be my sacrifice to the cause?" she asked. "Am I to give my
soul to its wrong keeper, that our party may flourish?"

"You don't like Tallente?"

"I like him immensely," she contradicted vigorously. "If I weren't
hopelessly in love with some one else, I could find it perfectly easy to
try and make life a different place for him."

He looked at her with trouble in his kind eyes. It was as though he had
suddenly stumbled upon a tragedy.

"I have never guessed this about you, Nora," he murmured.

"You are not observant of small things," she answered, a little
bitterly.

"Who is the man?"

"That I shall not tell you."

"Do I know him?"

"Less, I should say, than any one of your acquaintance."

He was silent for a moment or two. Then it chanced that the telephone
rang for him, with a message from the House of Commons. He gave some
instructions to his secretary.

"It is a queer thing," he remarked, as he replaced the receiver, "how
far our daily work and our ambitions take us out of our immediate
environment. I see you day by day, Nora, I have known you intimately
since your school days--and I never guessed."

"You never guessed and I have no time to suffer," she answered. "So we
go on until the breaking time comes, until one part of ourselves
conquers and the other loses. It is rather like that just now with
Andrew Tallente. A few more years and it will probably be like that
with me."

He threw his cigarette away as though the flavour had suddenly become
distasteful and sat drumming with his fingers upon the table, his eyes
fixed upon Nora.

"Talle