tuition she looked in his face and saw written there all the
hopelessness and longing which he was striving to conceal. For one
moment she saw clearly, and then the crooked perplexities of the world
seemed to stare cruelly in her eyes. A sob caught her voice, and before
she was conscious of her action she laid a hand on Lewis's arm and burst
into tears.

The sight was so unexpected that it deprived him of all power of action.
Then came the fatally easy solution that it was but reaction of
over-strained nerves. Always ill at ease in a woman's presence, a
woman's tears reduced him to despair. He stroked her hair gently as he
would have quieted a favourite horse.

"I am so sorry that these brutes have frightened you. But here we are
at Glenavelin gates."

And all the while his heart was crying out to him to clasp her in his
arms, and the words which trembled on his tongue were the passionate
consolations of a lover.

CHAPTER XVI

A MOVEMENT OP THE POWERS

At Mrs. Montrayner's dinner parties a world of silent men is sandwiched
between a _monde_ of chattering women. The hostess has a taste for busy
celebrities who eat their dinner without thought of the cookery, and
regard their fair neighbours much as the diners think of the band in a
restaurant. She chose her company with care, and if at her table there
was not the busy clack of a fluent conversation, there was always the
possibility of _bons mots_ and the off-chance of a State secret. So to
have dined with the Montrayners became a boast in a small social set,
and to the unilluminate the Montrayner banquets seemed scarce less
momentous than Cabinet meetings.

Wratislaw found himself staring dully at a snowy bank of flowers and
looking listlessly at the faces beyond. He was extremely worried, and
his grey face and sunken eyes showed the labour he had been passing
through. The country was approaching the throes of a crisis, and as yet
the future was a blind alley to him. There was an autumn session, and
he had been badgered all the afternoon in the Commons; his even temper
had been perilously near its limits, and he had been betrayed
unconsciously into certain ineptitudes which he knew would grin in his
face on the morrow from a dozen leading articles. The Continent seemed
on the edge of an outbreak; in the East especially, Russia by a score of
petty acts had seemed to foreshadow an incomprehensible policy. It was
a powder-barrel waiting for the spark; and he fe