out his coffee. "I do hope you will
find it good. The cigarettes are at your elbow. This is quite one of
the moments of life, isn't it?"

He agreed with her emphatically.

"A counsel of perfection," he murmured, as he sniffed the delicate
Turkish tobacco. "Tell me some more about yourself?"

She shook her head.

"I am much too selfish a person," she declared, "and nothing that I do
or say or am amounts to very much. I want you to let me a little way
into your life. Talk either about your soldiering or your politics.
You have been a Cabinet Minister and you will be again. Tell me what it
feels like to be one of the world's governors?"

"Let us finish talking about you first," he begged. "You spoke quite
frankly of a husband. Tell me, have you made up your mind what manner
of man he must be?"

"Not in the least. I am content to leave that entirely to fate."

"Bucolic? Intellectual? An artist? A man of affairs?"

She made a little grimace.

"How can I tell? I cannot conceive caring for an ordinary person, but
then every woman feels like that. And, you see, if I did care, he
wouldn't be ordinary--to me. And so far as I am concerned," she
insisted, with a shade of restlessness in her manner, "that finishes the
subject. You must please devote yourself to telling me at least some
of the things I want to know. What is the use of having one of the
world's successful men tete-a-tete, a prisoner to my hospitality, unless
I can make him gratify my curiosity?"

The thought created by her words burned through his mind like a flash of
destroying lightning.

"One of the world's successful men," he repeated. "Is that how I seem
to you?"

"And to the world," she asserted.

He shook his head sadly.

"I have worked very hard," he said. "I have been very ambitious. A few
of my ambitions have been gratified, but the glory of them has passed
with attainment. Now I enter upon the last lap and I possess none of
the things I started out in life to achieve."

"But how absurd!" she exclaimed. "You are one of our great politicians.
You would have to be reckoned with in any regrouping of parties."

"Without even a seat in the House of Commons," he reminded her bitterly.
"And again, how can a man be a great politician when there are no
politics? The confusion amongst the parties has become chaos, and I for
one have not been clear-sighted enough to see my way through."

"Of course, I know vaguely what you mean," she said, "but re