"If you do know it," he said slowly, "we have made the cruellest
mistake we could possibly have made. You can't know it!"

"It's about James Challoner--my father?" asked Cynthia, and Robert
Daventry shut his eyes with a look of great distress upon his face.

"How long have you known?" he asked.

"From the night when he came to the estancia," she answered. And she
told how she had slipped into the smoking-room and how, huddled in the
great chair, she had heard all that James Challoner proposed for her.
The shadow deepened upon Daventry's face as he listened, and when she
had ended he asked with deep regret:

"Why didn't you tell us this, Cynthia?"

"Because, just outside the smoking-room door in the hall, you both
decided not to tell me--not to breathe a word of--of my father's
visit. You thought the knowledge would trouble and frighten me. You
thought it would hurt. Well, I was as certain that you would be
greatly distressed to know that already I had the knowledge. So I held
my tongue."

"And it did trouble you?"

"Yes."

"A great deal?"

"Yes," Cynthia admitted. "I was frightened. I did not know what power
he might have. I knew you had fled from him for my sake."

"And since you have been here--during these three years--you have
still been troubled, still frightened lest he should come and claim
you with the law at his side?"

Though the old man could hardly speak above a whisper, he was
strangely insistent in his questioning. The words came unevenly, with
breaks between, and now and then a weak gasp for breath. Cynthia
replied quite simply:

"Yes, here, too, I have thought that he might come. I used to be
frightened at night. I used to hear him in the house."

And with every word she spoke the compunction and distress deepened in
Daventry's mind.

"What a pity!" he said. "Neither of us guessed, not even Joan, who was
quicker than I to notice things. And we thought we knew all about you,
Cynthia!" A faint smile lit up his face. "How little, after all, we
did know! For we could have spared you all this trouble. Read." And
opening his hand he let her take from it the newspaper slip. She
uttered a cry as she read the first lines.

"It's true," said Daventry, from the bed.

Cynthia carried the cutting over to the window and read by the fading
light. It gave the account of an inquest held at a small town
twenty-five miles up the line from the Daventry estancia on the body
of an Englishman who had been stabbed to the heart by a Gaucho in a
drunken quarrel at a tavern. There was a witness who had worked with
the Englishman, and could identify him. He called himself James
Challoner, and, when he was drunk, he would boast of his family.
Cynthia looked at the date of the paper. It was almost three years
old. James Challoner had been killed within a week of his dismissal by
Robert Daventry. Cynthia let the slip of paper fall from her fingers,
and stood by the window until Robert Daventry called her to his side.

"You held your tongue so as not to distress us," he whispered. "We
held ours so as not to frighten you. And so because we were careful of
your happiness, and you of ours, you have gone through years of
anxiety and terror. Needless anxiety! Terror without a cause! I am so
sorry. It seems so pitiful. It seems rather grim to me, Cynthia."

Cynthia answered quietly:

"That's the way things happen." And when she had spoken, Robert
Daventry, with an effort, raised himself upon his elbow and peered
into her face.

"You oughtn't to be able to say that, Cynthia," he said remorsefully.
"You oughtn't to be able to think it. It's not the proper philosophy
for twenty. I am afraid, my dear, that trouble has gone deep." He fell
back and in a moment a little whimsical smile flickered upon his face.
"I don't think I'll tell Joan about this," he said. "She wouldn't like
it. She wouldn't forgive herself for not having noticed that you were
troubled."

"After all, it was my fault," said Cynthia. "For I hid in the room.
However, it's all over now."

But Daventry was not prepared to accept her word. Some flash of
insight forbade him.

"It has left its mark, my dear," he insisted, and in broken sentences
he dwelt upon his theme. His mind began to wander after a little, but
through his wanderings there ran the thread of this idea:

"Joan was always so careful.... Even when you were quite a little girl
... we were never to laugh at you.... 'Children and dogs' she used to
say, 'you must never laugh at them. Little things warp children for
life.' ... Do you remember when you used to write plays and perform
them to us at Christmas, in a toy theatre, with small figures in tin
slides?... Joan was always careful that we should take them seriously,
and not laugh at the wrong place. I never did want to laugh at the
wrong place. I thought you wrote very good plays, Cynthia. I used to
say you were a genius. But Joan wouldn't have it. 'No!' she said, 'All
children are born dramatists, but they forget the trick of it
afterward.' ... I suppose she knew. She was a very clever woman--" and
so he drifted off gradually into sleep. Cynthia stayed by his side
while the twilight faded and the darkness came; and the light of the
fire danced ever more brightly upon the ceiling of the room. The wind
set from the west, and as the hours passed the chimes from the great
clock in Ludsey Church tower came softly and faintly into the room.
But they did not disturb the old man's rest. He went floating out on a
calm tide of sleep to his death, and Cynthia sat by his side wondering
in the intervals of her grief at the strange arrangement of life which
ordained that the efforts of people to secure the happiness of others
should only cause needless terrors and vain miseries.

                              CHAPTER X

                             MR. BENOLIEL

"There are no ladies," Captain Rames said indignantly, as he took his
seat in Mr. Benoliel's dining-room.

His neighbor, a florid and handsome man, a little past the prime of
life, glanced at the name on the visiting-card which marked Captain
Rames's place, and smiled sympathetically.

"I can quite understand," he returned with a pleasant pomposity, "that
to a sailor who has been three years in the Antarctic the deficiency
is a very lamentable business. But there are some elements of
consolation. Amongst the twelve men seated at this round table of
mahogany, you will hardly see one who has not made some stir in the
world. Upon your right, for instance, you will see Mr. Winthrop, that
long and sallow person. He is a political resident in one of the
native States of Rajputana, and his work, in six volumes, on the
Indian bangle, is, I believe, supposed to be the last word upon the
subject. A little nearer to you you will see a youth, though he is not
so young as he looks. He is M. Poileaux, and the only aviator who has
not yet fallen into the sea. When he does, he will come here no more.
I myself am a surgeon whose name, I believe, is not unknown."

And with a large white hand the famous Sir James Burrell discreetly
pointed out others of note to his companion.

Captain Rames glanced indifferently round the table. A few of the
twelve were in black coats, and amongst those few was Mr. Benoliel. It
was the night of a court ball, and most of the guests were in some
uniform or another, or shone in the gold of the privy councillor.

"They are, no doubt, men of vast importance," replied Captain Rames
bluntly. "But leaving you out of account, Sir James, I could dispense
with the lot of them. When I dine in Grosvenor Square, in June, I do
ask that there should be a petticoat on one side of me, at all
events."

The surgeon laughed good-humoredly. He studied his neighbor with a
quick observing eye. Captain Rames was of the middle height with a
squareness of build, which his gold epaulets exaggerated at this
moment, and he was square, too, of face. His hair was thick and curved
over from the side, parting in a dark turbulent comb, his forehead was
broad, his eyes keen and very steady. Vigor rather than refinement was
the mark of him; he had more character than intellect, more capacity
than knowledge; thus Sir James Burrell defined him.

"I have played the comforter," he said, "at so many bedsides that I
should feel my vanity touched if I failed to console you," he
returned. "Let me bring to your attention the menu. I am confident
that it will appeal to you."

"Yes, that's all right," Rames admitted, as he leaned forward and
glanced at the card. "But why should it particularly appeal to me?"

Sir James Burrell shrugged his shoulders.

"My profession brings me into touch with interesting people. I take my
pleasure in observing them. And I have always noticed that the men who
cheerfully endure the greatest hardships are also the first to demand
the best of the luxuries, when they are within reach."

"Well, it's true," said Captain Rames. "I can make a shift with
pemmican, but I honestly like a good dinner. It's the contrast, I
suppose."

Sir James shook his head.

"It goes deeper than that," said he. "Your pale saints are no doubt
profitable to the painters of glass windows, but I doubt if the world
owes so very much to them. The great things are really done by the
people who have a good deal of the animal in them; and animals like
good dinners."

Captain Rames was mollified, and his face took on a jovial look.

"I am animal enough," he said, "to purr when my back is scratched."

But Sir James Burrell was mounted on a hobby and hardly heeded the
interruption.

"I could quote historical instances, but I need go no further than
this room. Do you see the man sitting next to our host, and upon his
right?"

Captain Rames saw a small thin man in the dress of a privy councillor,
a man with a peaked, fleshless face, in which a pair of small eyes
twinkled alertly. A scanty crop of gray hair covered the back of his
skull, and left markedly visible the height and the narrowness of his
forehead. Captain Rames leaned forward with a new interest.

"Yes, and I recognize his face," he said. "Surely that is Henry
Smale."

"Exactly," returned Sir James. "He is in the cabinet, and, quite apart
from politics, he is, upon scientific grounds, a man of great
distinction."

"But, surely, he disproves your theory. He looks an ascetic."

"And is nothing of the kind," interrupted Sir James. "I admit that his
look of asceticism has been a great asset to him in his career. But
the public has quite misjudged him. He is a voluptuary, with the face
of a monk--the most useful combination for public life in this country
which you could possibly imagine. If he dines alone at his club, he
will not dine under a guinea; and he has the animal weaknesses up to
the brim of him. For instance, he is as jealous as a dog. Filch from
him the smallest of his prerogatives, and he will turn upon you
bitterly. Yet he has done great things, and initiated bold policies.
Why? Because he has enough of the animal in him to do great things."
And upon that Sir James broke off.

The butler was standing at the elbow of Captain Rames, with a jug of
champagne in one hand and a decanter of red wine in the other. He bent
down and offered Captain Rames his choice. Sir James Burrell
intervened.

"By the way," he said, "have you any wish to stand particularly well
with your host?"

"I am now beginning to think that I have," replied Captain Rames.

"Then I should choose his Burgundy. He has his fancies, like the rest
of us, and to prefer his Nuits-St.-George to champagne is one way to
his esteem."

Captain Rames took the hint, and, as he raised his glass to his lips,
Mr. Benoliel smiled to him across the table.

"I will ask your opinion upon that wine, Captain Rames," he said, and
so turned again to Henry Smale.

"You see, he noticed at once," said Sir James.

Captain Rames had noticed something too. At the mention of his name,
Henry Smale had looked up with interest. He was even now obviously
asking a question of Mr. Benoliel about him. Rames began to take more
careful stock of his host. Mr. Benoliel was a tall, high-shouldered
man, with a dark thin face in which delicacy seemed to predominate
over strength. His hair was black, and a little black moustache drew a
pencil line along his upper lip. His fingers were long and
extraordinarily restless. It was difficult to make a guess at his age.
A first glance would put him in the forties. But when Mr. Benoliel
showed his eyes--which was not always, for he had a trick of looking
out between lids half-closed--it seemed that he must have lived for
centuries; so much of fatigue and so much of patience were suddenly
revealed.

"I wonder why he asked me to dine here," said Harry Rames.

"You were certain to dine here," replied Sir James.

"I met him but the once by the purest accident."

"You were certain to meet him," said Sir James. "All famous people
meet him. All famous people dine here once. But he is not really a
snob. For, quite a number of them are never invited twice."

"He can be a good friend?"

"Of that I cannot speak," said Sir James.

The courses followed one after the other, and Harry Rames found his
eyes continually wandering back across the silver and bright flowers
to the exotic figure of his host. He took his share in the
conversation about him, but a movement of Mr. Benoliel would check him
in his speech or cause him to listen with an absent ear. He watched
the play of his delicate fingers upon the table-cloth, the continual
restlessness of his body. Mr. Benoliel was of his race; there was in
his aspect a queer mixture of the financier and the dilettante, the
shrewd business man and the sensuous apprecitator of art. There was a
touch, too, of the feminine in him.

"I told you that you would not be bored," said Sir James Burrell
toward the end of the dinner. "You are not the first man who has
fallen under the spell of Mr. Benoliel."

Harry Rames laughed.

"I am under no spell, I assure you," he said frankly. "I was wondering
whether he was likely to be of use to me."

"It is very likely," returned Sir James. "He has been of use to many.
He plays at omniscience. To anticipate a wish before it is expressed,
to serve an ambition before it has been revealed--that is one of our
host's little vanities. He may have asked you here with no other
object than to gratify it."

Harry Rames glanced quickly at his companion.

"Is that so?" he asked eagerly. Then his face fell. "But I am not even
a friend of his."

"I do not think that matters," said the surgeon. "He likes to pose as
Providence, and the posture will be more dramatic if it is assumed
toward an acquaintance rather than a friend."

"He is a sham, then," said Rames bluntly.

"By no means," Sir James replied suavely. "Let us say, rather, that he
is an artist."

Captain Rames turned with a furrowed brow to his companion.

"I am no great hand at subtleties," he said. "Will you tell me what
you know of Mr. Benoliel? I am a beginner in the world, and he may be
of importance to me."

Sir James Burrell smiled. He was in his element. To supply a character
much as some author of the seventeenth century might have done, was a
foible which continually tempted him. He was not always successful.
Paradox allured him into difficulties, cheap epigrams at times blazed
before him, and would not be quiet until he had uttered them. But
often he managed to hit off, with some happiness, at all events, the
externals of the person whom he described. He drank his wine now
slowly and set down his glass. Then, twisting the delicate stem with
the finger-tips of his large and handsome hand, he began:

"He is a Jew, of course, and an Oriental. But from what quarter of the
Orient, who shall say? You may give him any birthplace, from the
Levant to Casa Blanca, and no one will contradict you. Some hold him
to be a charlatan, as you are inclined to do. But he is an accepted
personage, not blown into notice and out of it by the favor of a
season, but a permanency. How he became so, I cannot tell you. He is
very busy all day, although when the darkness comes it would be
difficult to point to any one thing which he has done. He is always at
the top table at public dinners, and very near to the chairman. But he
never proposes a toast or responds to one. If he writes a letter to
the _Times_, it appears in leaded type. If you want secret information
on any subject, he can get it for you. If you want help, he will find
the man who can give it. He is a power in the city. He is a power in
politics, and the motor-cars of prime-ministers stand at his door at
ten o'clock in the morning. Yet he was never in the House, and has
never made a speech on any platform. It is believed by many that he
might achieve greatness if he chose. But he never chooses. He has the
air at a discussion of being able to say the last word on any subject,
but he does not say it. He seems, indeed, to stand high in the world
on a pedestal which has no legs to it. That is how I describe him. For
the rest, he is rich, and I have never heard him utter an opinion
which was not derived from others or altogether banal. But, listen! He
is going to speak to us."

"However, I can recommend the old brandy," was all that Mr. Benoliel
had at that moment to say.

"There, what did I tell you!" said Sir James, triumphant at the
success of his diagnosis.

"Well, if his talk is banal his brandy isn't, God bless him," said
Captain Rames. "But I interrupted you."

"He has been guilty of one weakness," Sir James resumed. "He married
into an old family of great poverty and the marriage lasted for six
months. His wife lives handsomely in Eton Square--But I see that I am
going to lose you, for our host is beckoning to you."

Captain Rames obeyed the summons with alacrity and walked round the
table.

"I see that you are going on to Buckingham Palace," said Mr. Benoliel.
"So I thought that I would interrupt your conversation with Sir James
Burrell. For I want to introduce you to Mr. Smale."

Mr. Smale held out his hand. At a sign from Benoliel, the butler
brought up a chair and placed it between Smale and his host.

"Sit down," said Benoliel, and Captain Rames obeyed.

"Benoliel tells me," said Smale, "that you are thinking of
Parliament."

Captain Rames was startled. He could not remember that in his one
brief conversation with his host he had even mentioned his ambition.

"I inferred it from a casual word or two you let drop," said Benoliel
with a smile.

"Well, it's true," said Rames. "I should like to stand on your side
very much, Mr. Smale, if I could find a seat to contest."

Henry Smale nodded.

"That, no doubt, could be arranged. You would be a strong candidate.
You bring a reputation and some breath of romance to favor you.
But--" and he pursed up his lips as if in doubt and looked at Captain
Rames with a searching eye. Rames was disconcerted. He had been back
in England for some six months, and during those six months he had
been much sought after. At this period of his life, doubts of him had
been rarely expressed behind his back, and never to his face. Young
ladies whom he did not know had clamored for his autograph, young
ladies whom he did know had approached him with a winning humility;
established beauty had smiled at him; established fame had welcomed
him as an equal. The calm scrutiny of Henry Smale was a displeasing
splash of cold water.

"Of course," he said, with a diffidence which he did not feel, "I
might be a failure."

And Henry Smale replied promptly:

"That's just it. You might be a failure. Meanwhile you are a great
success, and have the chance of standing quite alone in your career.
For what you set out to do is not yet done. You leave the laurel for
another to snatch."

"That is quite true, Mr. Smale," Harry Rames replied. "But I have
considered it. I am not yielding to an impulse. I have counted the
risk!"

He spoke with a nice adjustment of firmness and modesty. Henry Smale
rose from his chair.

"Very well," he said. "Will you come down to the House at four o'clock
to-morrow afternoon? I will introduce you to Hanley, the chief whip."

Captain Rames flushed with pleasure.

"Thank you, I shall be delighted," he cried, rising in his turn; and
as the two men shook hands, Mr. Benoliel said gently:

"I was thinking of Ludsey. It has no candidate on your side, Smale."

                              CHAPTER XI

                          A MAN ON THE MAKE

A week later, and much about the same hour, Captain Rames was driven
along the Mall in St. James's Park. Friday had come round again, and
the light did not burn in the clock-tower at Westminster. But the
windows of the admiralty blazed upon the horse-guards' parade, and its
great doors stood open for a glittering company. It was the night of
official dinners and receptions in honor of the king's birthday.
Soldiers in scarlet, sailors in blue, ministers and privy councillors
in gold, and ladies in their shimmering gowns thronged with the
smaller fry in black coats up the shallow steps into a hall decorated
with Union Jacks. There was a thrill of expectancy in the air that
evening. Rumors were rife that the government was inclined to advise a
dissolution. Members' wives were speculating whether they must go back
to the constituencies and tread the ways of deference; their husbands
how soon the time would come when they must exchange the erect dignity
of the member for the supple curves of the candidate; and curious eyes
dwelt, as if in hope of answer upon a sturdy white-haired man with a
blunt, good-humored face, who, wearing a uniform with epaulets, left
you in doubt whether he was a fireman or an admiral. He was, however,
the Prime-Minister, and he stood in the hall amongst his friends,
bearing the world lightly according to his wont. He stepped forward
and shook hands with Rames as he passed, and so turned again to his
friends. He was heard to say, "I have to-day achieved the ambition of
my life;" and curious ears eager to glean a hint were inclined toward
him.

"To-day?" one of the group exclaimed. "You have been Prime-Minister
for three years."

The Prime-Minister laughed.

"That's nothing," he said. "To become Prime-Minister was merely to
take a step on the way. But to-night I wear for the first time the
uniform of an Elder Brother of the Trinity, and that means that I need
never wear knee-breeches again as long as I live."

The curious ears were disappointed; Harry Rames shook hands with the
First Lord of the Admiralty, passed on, and in the second room was
touched on the elbow by Isaac Benoliel.

"I have been asked by a young friend of mine to bring you to her, and
I beg you to come at once, for she is in her most imperious mood,"
said Mr. Benoliel in a voice of whimsical entreaty.

"We will go to her as fast as we can," said Captain Rames.

He had now been three months in England, and the shy warmth of many
welcomes had made him thoroughly aware that he was a momentous
personage to young ladies. He was human enough to enjoy his
importance, and he followed Mr. Benoliel with alacrity toward a side
of the room where Cynthia Daventry sat talking to a young man in the
office of the Board of Trade. Rames noticed the clear and delicate
profile of her face and the distinction which set her apart; he
noticed, too, that, although she did not once look his way, the young
gentleman in the Civil Service uniform was summarily dismissed.

"Cynthia, this is Captain Rames," said Isaac Benoliel, and however
imperious a mood Cynthia might have shown to him, she had reserved
none of it for Captain Rames. Her eyes swept over him swiftly with the
shy and eager look to which he had grown accustomed: she gave him her
hand.

"I am very glad to meet you," she said impulsively, "because--" and
she halted suddenly upon the word, with the color like a rose in her
cheeks, "I suppose that you are tired of congratulations."

Captain Rames expanded: he laughed genially, a fastidious critic might
have said too noisily.

"By no means," he exclaimed. "Indeed, Miss Daventry, you may lay it on
with a trowel."

"I am not prepared to do that," answered Cynthia, and though she spoke
lightly, her voice was guarded, and even in the eager eyes there was a
constant watchfulness.

Eight months had passed since Cynthia had sat by the bedside of Robert
Daventry and listened to his instructions. She had taken Diana Royle
to live with her as he had bidden, though she had taken her
reluctantly. She had spent nearly all that time at the white house
upon the London road, in spite of Mrs. Royle's repeated suggestion
that Beaulieu, or preferably Cap D'Ail in the south of France would be
more satisfactory places for wintering. Diana Royle was glad to be
relieved from her genteel penury in Sussex Gardens, Kensington, but
she had no liking for the country. Cynthia, however, was deaf to her
hints. She lived for a while in solitude, broken only by the
companionship of the few neighbors with whom she was most intimate.
The swift deaths of the two old people who had so long lived for her
and in her, left her desolate and inclined ever regretfully to search
back across her life for occasions in which she had failed of kindness
toward them, or hurt them by forgetfulness. She was young, however,
and with no taint of morbidness. The sense of desolation passed, and
Diana Royle began to urge a new plan.

"You ought to take a house in town for the season, Cynthia. I know of
one in an excellent position, which would just suit you. It's in
Curzon Street, and the right end of the street, one of those nice,
flat-fronted houses, old outside and tiled bath-rooms inside. I
happened, I think, to see an advertisement of it to-day."

Mrs. Royle handed the newspaper to Cynthia, looked it over.

"We might think of it," she said.

"I am sure neither Mr. nor Mrs. Daventry would have wished you to bury
yourself always in the country."

"That's true," said Cynthia. "My father looked forward to my taking a
house in town."

"I don't think you could do better than this, dear," said Diana Royle.
"I know the house quite well by sight."

"Well, we'll think of it," said Cynthia.

Mrs. Royle suppressed a shrug of irritation.

"You will find the house will be snapped up, dear, if you take too
long thinking of it," she said with asperity.

Cynthia looked at her with innocent eyes.

"But I expect there will be other houses in London, won't there?" she
asked.

She had no wish to be churlish, she understood how deeply her
companion longed for the paved roadways and the streets. And in her
own heart, too, she was beginning to turn to the unknown world of
London with an expectancy of adventure, which drew her and thrilled
her, even while she hesitated.

"I don't understand you, Cynthia," Diana Royle cried in exasperation.
"Are you afraid?"

The question was intended merely as a gibe, but Cynthia turned to her
with startled eyes, and Mrs. Royle knew that she had chanced upon a
truth.

"Of what are you afraid?" she asked curiously, and Cynthia answered
while she looked into the fire:

"I once lay all night staring into a great bright mirror which
revealed to me a shut door. I was in terror lest the door should open.
I dreaded what might come through. I seem still to be looking into the
great mirror, and with the same kind of fear. Only now the door opens
upon the world, and not on the passage of a house."

Diana Royle gathered up her embroidery and her book.

"If you are going to talk that sort of nonsense, Cynthia, I shall go
to bed," she remarked sternly, and left Cynthia still gazing into the
fire.

Cynthia had not been speaking with affectation. The terror with which
her father had for so long inspired her had left its mark deep, as
Robert Daventry upon his death-bed had understood. He was dead--yes,
but she could not rid her thoughts of the dreadful destiny which he
had proposed for her. By so little she had escaped it. She would look
round the room with its books and its dainty appointments, and feel
the arms of her chair to make sure that all was real.

"If he had carried me away!" she would cry. "If he had come back with
the law at his side and had carried me away!" And the streets of
Buenos Ayres would pass before her eyes in a procession of blazing
thoroughfares and dimly lighted lanes. And because she had escaped by
so little, she looked out upon all unknown things with apprehension.
Moreover, Daventry's disclosure to her upon his death-bed had, in a
strange way, added to her apprehension. There were three people--thus
her thoughts ran; two of them seeking to hide from her knowledge which
they thought would cause her pain; and she the third, seeking to hide
from them, just for the same reason, that the knowledge was hers
already. The years of terror had been needless, yet they had been
endured, and it was love itself which had inflicted them. Kindness
then could do just the same harm as the deliberate will to hurt. She
took that thought into her heart of hearts, and because of it dreaded
what might come through when the door opened upon the world.

With the coming of the spring, however, there came a stir in her
blood. It was a spring of sunlit days and warm, soft nights. The great
garden bursting into leaf and blossom, the annual miracle of tender
green, the return of the birds, and the renewal of melody quickened
the girl's pulses, gave to her a lightness of spirit, and made her
dreamily expectant of wonders. She walked of an evening under her
great cedar trees, with the flowers and the paths glimmering pale in
the warm dusk, and the earth whispered to her of things as yet beyond
her knowledge; throbbing moments of life, dreams minted in events. She
woke eagerly to the clear, early mornings and the blackbirds calling
on the lawn; she lingered on that lawn when the windows in the house
were alight and the nightingales sang in the copses, and from some
distant wood the clear, double note of a cuckoo was borne to her
across the darkness. There came an evening in the middle of May when
she burst her sheath like any bud on the bole of one of her chestnut
trees. She stood a creature of emotion. The soft wind brought to her
ears the chimes of the clock in the great church tower at Ludsey.
Desire for the adventure overswept her fears. Her feet danced, and her
youth had its way with her.

She could see through the long open window Diana Royle in the
drawing-room. She ran across the grass.

"Di!"

Some new sound in her voice, a leap, a thrill, made Diana look up. She
saw a look in the girl's face, a light in her eyes, a soft color in
her cheeks which quite transfigured her.

"I have been rather a brute, Di," cried Cynthia. "We will go to
London."

"When?"

"As soon as we can pack."

A telegram was sent off to Mr. Benoliel, who was now in Grosvenor
Square. He was bidden to work his quickest and his best. The furnished
house in Curzon Street was still unlet. It was secured, and by the
beginning of June Cynthia had come to town. There she was of course
unknown. But she had made many friends in Warwickshire. Mr. Benoliel
set his shoulder to the wheel; and she had a handsome balance at the
bank. Add to these advantages her looks, and it will be seen that it
was fairly smooth sailing for Cynthia during her first season. She
danced, she dined, she lunched at Hurlingham, she went to plays and to
the opera, she rode under the trees of the Row in the morning, she
went up in a balloon; she came with both hands outstretched for new
experiences. Yet she grasped them with a certain wariness. Eager she
was, but her eagerness was guarded. For dim in the shadows at the back
of her mind there was still the image of the mirror and the door. She
had been in London less than a month when Harry Rames was brought to
her side by Mr. Benoliel.

They talked for a moment upon immaterial topics, and then Mr. Benoliel
turned to Harry Rames:

"So it is all settled, I hear."

"Practically," replied Rames. "I have still to be formally adopted as
prospective candidate by the Three Hundred, but that will be done at a
meeting on Monday night."

"Then there is no longer any reason why we should keep the matter
secret, especially from Miss Daventry, who lives not five miles from
your constituency. Cynthia," and both men turned toward her, "Captain
Rames is going to stand for Ludsey at the next election."

Captain Rames smiled modestly, expecting congratulations. He liked
congratulations, especially from pretty girls, but he was
disappointed. He saw only a wrinkle of perplexity upon Cynthia's
forehead and a shadow in her eyes.

"Why?" she asked.

"You disapprove?" said Rames.

Cynthia drew back.

"I have no right to disapprove," she said coldly, and Harry Rames
planted himself sturdily on both his feet in front of her.

"Nevertheless you do," he insisted.

In spite of herself, a faint smile of amusement played about Cynthia's
lips as she watched him. She felt constrained to accept his challenge.

"I should have thought--" she said with a trifle of hesitation; "it's
not my business, of course--you may think it an impertinence--but
since you challenge me, I should have thought that you would have done
better to have gone back to the Antarctic again."

"That's just what Smale said," remarked Mr. Benoliel, and he moved
away.

"That's just what Smale said, what every one will say. But it's all
wrong," Rames exclaimed emphatically. "I was very glad to go South. I
am very glad now that I went; but once is enough."

A little wrinkle of disdain showed about Cynthia's mouth.

"No doubt there were many hardships."

Captain Rames was nettled.

"Yes, there were, Miss Daventry, a great many, and singularly
unpleasant ones. I have been twenty-four hours in a sleeping-bag with
two other men. The sleeping-bag was sewn up on the inside, it was
within a tent, we were so close together that we could only turn round
one at a time, and we smoked in the bag, and still we were deadly
cold. And I hate being cold. Yes, there were hardships, and though
it's easy enough to remember them lightly here in the Admiralty, they
were not delightful when they happened. But I should face them once
more if I wanted to go back. Only I don't. I never want to see an
ice-pack again as long as I live."

The bluff confidence with which he spoke convinced Cynthia that it was
not a fear of the hardships which had affected him. There she had been
wrong, and she made amends.

"I have no doubt the hardships wouldn't deter you if you wanted to
go," she admitted. "But what I don't understand is why you don't want
to." And a greater emphasis crept into her voice than she had meant to
use, and gave to her words the wistfulness of an appeal. "I should
have thought," she cried, "that you could never have rested until you
had finished what you had begun."

"That's true to the letter," he replied. "That's why I am standing for
Ludsey."

Cynthia looked up at him in surprise.

"I don't think that I understand," she said quietly, and she made room
upon the couch at her side. Harry Rames took the place. The appeal in
her voice was a flattery which he quite failed to understand. Though
Cynthia was young, and though she walked no longer in her enchanted
garden, something of that spirit of romance, which had guided her
there, had revived in her of late. Captain Rames was one of the chosen
men for whom the turnstile had revolved; now that she met him in the
flesh she could not forget it. He was of her dreams, he had marched in
the procession of heroes, and though disillusionment had come to her
he still wore a look of the heroic in her thoughts. All the more
because disillusionment had come to her she wished him to retain the
look. Her appeal was a prayer that he should stamp it upon his image
for good and all.

"May I explain it all to you?" he asked. He sat down beside her, and
in answer to that gentle appeal of hers to make the best of himself,
he drew for her clearly and succinctly and proudly the picture of a
man on the make. "I went South, first and last, to get on in the
world," he began. "As I say, I was very glad to go. The journey was a
great experience. Yes, three years of my life were very well spent
upon it; but they were very well spent, not because the journey was a
great experience, but because it is now the great help to me in
getting on, which I always thought it was going to be."

He took no notice of the disappointment gathering upon Cynthia's face.
He was not aware of it. Here was a girl of remarkable loveliness,
wistfully appealing to him to explain the inner workings of his mind,
and he was delighted to gratify her wish.

"I can hardly remember the time when I was not diligently looking for
a chance to get on. I was poor, you see. I am so still, indeed. I had
none of those opportunities which money commands. I had somehow to
create or find them. There's a motto in gold letters above the clock
in the great hall at Osborne, the first of all mottoes in its superb
confidence:

               "'There is nothing the navy cannot do.'"

Cynthia turned to him with eagerness.

"Yes," she said with a smile. "For a boy to have that plain and simple
statement before his eyes each day, that's splendid. I suppose a boy
would never speak of it, but it would be to him a perpetual
inspiration."

"Yes," said Rames, "if all he thought of was the navy; if his
ambitions were bound up with the navy. But mine weren't, you see, and
I used to worry over that sentence even then. 'There is nothing the
navy cannot do.' Very well. But that didn't mean that this little
particular, insignificant cog-wheel in the navy machine was going to
do anything special, or, indeed, anything at all. And I wanted to do
things--I myself, not the navy."

"To do things?" Cynthia asked quietly, and her lips drooped a little
at the corners, "Or to become a personage?"

Captain Rames laughed good-humoredly.

"I can meet you there, Miss Daventry. There's no contradiction in the
phrases. To become a personage is to secure the opportunity of doing
things, and when you are a personage you soon find things which want
doing. After all, how many of the great statesmen started out to be
big men first. They had ideas, I grant you, but they had to make
themselves big men by hook or by crook before they could carry them
out. Look at Disraeli. I have been reading up these fellows. He did a
lot of things. He got the Suez Canal shares. He is the author and
begetter of the Imperial Idea. That's what you remember and admire him
for. Yes; but don't forget his velvet trousers, and his habit of
reciting his epic poems in the drawing-room after dinner. He set out
first of all to be a personage. So do I in my small way. He chose
velvet trousers and epic poems. I went down toward the South Pole. We
each chose the path of least resistance."

Cynthia was silenced, but not convinced. There must be hundreds of
instances to confute him, only for the moment she could not remember
any of them. And one quality in Captain Rames impressed her.

"You speak as if you had thought all these things out," she said.

"I have had to," he replied.

"I wonder that you went into the navy at all."

"My father put me there," he answered.

Cynthia looked him over again, noting the strong, square face, the
direct, the practical, common-sense, uninspired look of him. He would
get on without a doubt. There was a great deal of force to push him
on, and no great delicacy of character to hold him back. Scruples
would not trouble him, and he would not fail of friends. He was of the
type which makes friends easily. Even she herself was attracted. He
would get on probably by trampling upon others, but he would do it
good-humoredly, and with no desire to cause unnecessary pain. There
are men, after all, who put nails in their boots to do the trampling.

"I wonder, with your views," she said, upon an impulse, "that you
didn't leave the navy long ago and go into the city."

Harry Rames looked at her quickly.

"It's rather curious that you should have said that; for, a few years
ago, I was actually thinking of the city, and wondering whether I
could make a fortune quickly there."

Cynthia laughed suddenly. Her suggestion had been uttered in sarcasm.
Youth is disinclined to rate the making of money high in its standard
of careers. Captain Ramos would never have passed the turnstile had
she spoken with him when the turnstile was.

"What held me back," he continued, quite unconscious that he was
toppling off a hero's perch,--and indeed he would have been totally
indifferent had he known,--"what held me back was the knowledge that I
should be beginning too old. One has so very little time," he
exclaimed with a touch of passion in his voice. "I would like to go on
living and living and living for a century. As it is, one begins at
twenty at the earliest, and then with luck one may have fifty-five
years--that's all," and the prospect of the disintegration of his
powers at the early age of seventy-five affected him with so much
melancholy that Cynthia laughed again, but this time with a clear and
joyous ring of amusement.

"Never mind, Captain Rames, I am sure you will live every day of your
fifty-five years, and that is more than all can say."

"They are only thirty-five now," he grumbled. "However,"--he was
not to be diverted from the pleasant business of unfolding his
character,--"I might still have gone into the city, when one morning
in June, as I was walking round the corner of Buckingham Palace to
Constitution Hill, I saw on the other side of the road the president
of the Geographical Society. I knew him slightly. I had read of the
expedition; I was aware that he was organizing it. It came upon me in
a flash, 'By George, here's my chance at last,' and I ran across the
road and applied for the command."

Cynthia nodded her head.

"So that's how you became connected with the expedition--a pure piece
of chance," she said slowly. "If you hadn't turned round that corner
to Constitution Hill----"

"Oh, I should have dropped across something else, no doubt," said
Rames.

"And now you are going into Parliament."

Cynthia was endeavoring to readjust her forecasts with the facts.

"If I get elected," said Rames.

"Oh, you will get elected," replied Cynthia confidently, but there was
no admiration in her confidence. It was almost disdainful. "They will
call you 'Breezy Harry Rames,' and they will elect you by an immense
majority."

"I am very glad you think that," Rames returned imperturbably; and he
leaned forward with his elbow on his knees and spoke to her upon an
altogether different note; so that the disdain died out of her face.
He told her how in answer to Henry Smale's invitation he had gone down
to Westminster in the afternoon, had sent in his card, had waited by
the rails in the great round of St. George's Hall. Smale had come out
from the House, and had fetched him down the stone passage into the
lobby. A great man was speaking, and the lobby was nearly empty. But
he finished his speech in a few moments, and the doors burst open and
there was an eruption of members from the Chamber. Some stood in
groups talking eagerly, others hurried to the libraries and the
smoking-room, and barristers walked up and down in pairs, talking over
their cases for the morrow. There was not a thing in that lobby, from
the round clock above the doors of the House to the post-office and
the whip's rooms which had not impressed itself vividly upon Rames's
mind. Every now and then the doors would swing open as a member passed
into the Chamber, and just for a moment Rames had a glimpse of the
green benches, saw the great mace gleam upon the table, the books and
the three clerks gowned and wigged behind it, and behind the clerks
the dim figure of the Speaker under the canopy of his chair.

Of what he saw on that afternoon Rames spoke with an enthusiasm and a
modesty which quite took Cynthia by surprise. He saw dignity in every
detail, was prepared to magnify with great meanings the simplest
ceremony and form. He could not but impress her with his picture, so
greatly impressed was he himself, so keenly had he longed to walk
unchallenged down that forbidden way between the rails and to pass
through the swing doors over the matting to his place on the green
benches. People in the streets might sneer, or go about their business
unconcerned. The cynics might talk of the Ins and Outs, and speak of
Parliament as the most expensive game in which a race of players of
games indulges, but there in that small room, with the soft light
pouring down from the roof, and very often the morning light streaming
in through the clerestory windows, the great decisions were ratified
which might hamper or advance the future of forty millions.

Henry Smale had paced the lobby for half an hour with Rames, setting
before him clearly the risks which he would run.

"I don't want to advise you one way or the other," said Smale, "but it
is not as if you had no career, and you should come to your decision
with your eyes open. I speak to you as to one of the ambitious. If you
go in, I take it, you go in with an eye on the Treasury bench. Well, I
can tell you this: the House of Commons makes a few, but it breaks a
few, and if it advances some, it mars a good many. Poverty is a
serious hindrance, for it means that you cannot give the time to the
House of Commons which it now claims."

"There are the barristers," objected Rames.

"The House of Commons is in their line of business," returned Henry
Smale. "The highest offices of the law are reached through the House
of Commons. Moreover, the questions which arise for debate here have
often been the subject already of suits in the law courts. They have
acquired, too, the knack of extracting rapidly the essential things
out of a paper or a bill. Thus, the barristers come especially
equipped. Yet, even so, very often they do not make their mark. And
here is a point for you, Captain Rames." Henry Smale turned with a
warning finger upraised and stopped in his walk. "The most
distinguished men enter this House and never get the ear of it. The
House of Commons is not ungenerous, but for eight hours a day through
a long portion of the year people are talking in that Chamber there,
and it will not provide an audience unless, first, the speaker has
something of his own to contribute, and, secondly, can express his
contribution. It does not, on the one hand, ask for oratory; it is
not, on the other, content even with exhaustive knowledge; it demands
character, personality, the power of coining out of your knowledge
some judgments of your own, the power of explaining your judgment in
clear and intelligible phrases sufficiently vivid to arrest its
attention. I admit at once that if you succeed, success here is
sweeter than anywhere else; its recognition is so immediate. But, on
the other hand, here disappointment is more bitter. To come in with
ambition, and to be left behind in the race--there is no destiny more
galling."

"Yes," said Rames quietly, "I have thought over these things. There is
that risk. I am prepared to take it."

"Very well," returned Smale, and once more he turned on the stone
pavement, and with Rames at his side retraced his steps. "Let us
suppose that you have got the ear of the House, that the benches fill
up when you rise, and men stand at the bar to listen to you. Well,
even so, you may lose your seat, and you may not yet have established
yourself firmly enough to make your party find you another. There you
are--out, your dreams dissolved, your ambitions stopped, yourself
miserable, and your presence in this lobby an insignificance. Where
you walked by right, you come as a guest; you have been, and you are
not; you must turn to something else, while your thoughts are here,
and very likely you are already too old to turn to something else."

"You put the worst side of it all in front of me, Mr. Smale."

"No," replied Mr. Smale. "Visit the political clubs a couple of months
after a general election, talk to the defeated candidates who two
months back were members, you will know I am talking the truth. The
place enmeshes you. And mind, not because of the sensations. The
sensations happily are rare. It is a humdrum assembly. I remember once
taking a foreigner into the strangers' gallery at the time of a
European crisis. An indiscreet letter had been sent. The foreigner was
elated. He said to me, 'This will be very interesting. The Commons
will discuss the letter which has so convulsed Europe.' But it was
doing nothing of the kind. It was discussing whether the Tyne, Durham,
and Hartlepool Railway paid its employees sufficiently well to justify
Parliament in allowing it to build a bridge across a stream of which
you have never heard."

Captain Rames smiled.

"I see a good many men in this lobby," he rejoined. "I do not notice
that any of them are bored. Indeed, for the most part, they seem very
busy."

"That is one of the tragedies of the House of Commons," Smale replied.
"There are so many men in who during the whole of each session are
extremely busy doing nothing; they haven't a moment to spare, they do
nothing with so much energy and persistence. One moment they are in
the library writing to a constituent who wants to know why the medal
which his father earned in the Crimea has not yet arrived; the next
moment they rush into the House because the famous Irishman with the
witty tongue is up; they are off again to the outer lobby to tell a
visitor that he can't see the Prime-Minister--'Industry without work,
idleness without rest,' that is how this House was once described,
and, believe me, the description is not inapt."

Thus said Henry Smale, but Harry Rames was not to be turned aside.

"I will take all these risks very willingly, Mr. Smale," he cried, "I
want to be in here."

Henry Smale smiled, ceased from his arguments, and clapped Rames in a
kindly fashion on the shoulder. "I have done my duty," he said.
"Come!"

He led Rames through a little doorway at the side of which sat three
or four messengers, and at the end of a narrow passage tapped upon a
door.

"Come in," said a voice, and as Smale ushered in Harry Rames a man of
pleasant address and an exquisite suit of clothes arose and welcomed
them.

"Hamlin," said Henry Smale, "this is Captain Rames."

Mr. Hamlin shook hands cordially with Rames and invited him to a
chair.

"We shall be very glad to have you in the House," he said. He beamed.
He seemed to have been waiting for Captain Rames to complete his
happiness. "I think Ludsey was suggested."

"Benoliel suggested it," said Smale. "He's a good judge too."

"There is no candidate arranged yet. I will write to Ludsey at once."

Smale and Rames left the room together.

"I should think you might consider that settled," said Smale.

Rames thanked him and referred to Hamlin's charm of manner. Smale's
small eyes twinkled.

"That's why he sits in that room. He's the chief Whip." And shaking
hands with Rames Mr. Smale abruptly returned to the House.

The gist of the conversation with Smale Rames told to Cynthia in the
reception-room at the Admiralty, and she listened with a growing
interest. Then once more his note changed. He spoke with a boyish
enthusiasm of his aims. To force an entrance into that arena; the
entrance gained, to fight himself into the station of a great man;
ultimately to govern and exercise authority--the note of personal
ambition rose to a pitch of exultation in his voice. Of principles he
obviously had no care, theories of politics were to him of no account.
He was the political adventurer pure and simple. Cynthia sat with her
eyes of dark blue clouded, and a real disappointment at her heart. She
raised her face to his, and a little smile trembled upon her lips, and
even her voice shook ever so slightly.

"You have been very honest to me about it all," she said. "I thank you
for that."

Captain Rames was a trifle bewildered. He could not see that he had
anything to conceal.

"Good-night," she said as she rose, "I see my friend Mrs. Royle
waiting for me."

She gave him her hand and moved away for a few steps and then stopped.
Harry Rames was at her side before she had stopped. She turned to him
timidly with the blood mounting very prettily into her cheeks.

"I suppose," she said, "that your journey to the South really counts
now for very little in your thoughts. Yet you must have had a great
many wishes for your success sent to you from all parts of the world
before you started. I wonder you can forget them all, and leave that
work unfinished."

It seemed to Captain Rames that she had hit upon a rather far-fetched
argument to persuade him to a second journey to the South.

"Well, I am getting a good many wishes for my success now, and I hear
them spoken," he said with a smile. "It is true that I got all sorts
of messages and telegrams before I sailed to the South. But to tell
you the truth I was rather too busy to read them. I have got them all
tied up somewhere in a brown-paper parcel."

Cynthia seemed actually to flinch. She turned away abruptly.

"I wanted to ask of you a favor," said Rames. "Mr. Benoliel said that
you lived near Ludsey. You could do a great deal if you would help me.
Will you?"

Cynthia turned back to him, her eyes shone angrily, the blood came
into her cheeks in a rush.

"No," she said decisively, and without another word she walked away.

"I might have struck her," thought Captain Rames. He knew nothing
of a telegram from the Daventry estancia which lay forgotten in that
brown-paper parcel.

None the less he walked home across the Mall treading upon air. Great
people had moved out of their way to make his acquaintance; Cabinet
ministers had promised to speak for him; important ladies had smiled
their friendliest. He looked back upon the days of his insignificance,
and his heart was buoyant within him. Certainly one girl with
dark-blue eyes and a face like a rose-leaf had presumed to disapprove
of him. But there! Girls! You never knew what odd notions nested in
their pretty heads. If a man on the make steered his course by a
girl's favor, he would soon shipwreck on a snag. However, this girl
must be soothed down. Harry Rames could not afford to have an enemy at
Ludsey. But he had no doubt that he could soothe her down. He walked
home, softly whistling under his breath.

Cynthia for her part went home in a different mood. She had lost
another illusion to-night.

                             CHAPTER XII

                              LUNGATINE

The threatened dissolution was, after all, postponed, and through the
autumn months Captain Rames went busily up and down between London and
Ludsey. He made his head-quarters at an hotel on a climbing street in
the thick of the town, and spent his days in the public view and his
nights at meetings and at local festivities.

Cynthia Daventry, five miles away, heard stories of his indefatigable
energy and once or twice she met him in the streets; and once or twice
he snatched an afternoon and swept over in a motor-car to see her. She
welcomed him with a pleasure which she rather resented, and not for
worlds would she have asked him how his campaign was faring. She did
not, however, have to ask. For either Diana Royle was present and
eagerly questioned him, or if Cynthia were alone he plunged into the
subject himself. Captain Rames was at some pains to amuse her and he
succeeded. Little incidents of the campaign, whether they told against
himself or not; sketches of queer characters whom he came across; an
anecdote now and then, drawn from the ancient history of the City--he
poured them out to her, making it quite clear with an apparently
ingenuous frankness that he had deliberately stored them in his memory
purely for her amusement. He was engaged in the work of soothing her
down. Diana Royle would rhapsodize after he had whirled away in a
cloud of dust.

"What a wonderful man! How energetic! How clever!"

"And how complacent!" said Cynthia.

"What high principle!" Diana gushed lyrically. "What character!"

"And what cunning!" added Cynthia, with a droop of her lips.

Diana tapped the floor with an irritable foot.

"Very well, darling. Look for an angel, by all means. You will be very
glad of a man later on." Then she laughed pleasantly. "But I am not
deceived. You talk lightly of him when he is gone, but when he is here
you fix your big eyes on him, and, though you say nothing, every
movement of you asks for more."

Cynthia was startled.

"Well, perhaps I do," she admitted. "I suppose that I have a kind of
hope that I will hear, not more, but something different from what I
am hearing."

"That's so like you, my dear," Diana rejoined; she was all sugar and
vinegar. "If Julius Cæsar came back to earth, you would want him
different. But that's the way with romantic people. They look for
heroes all day and never see them when they knock at the front door."

Cynthia laughed good-humoredly. There was this much of truth in Diana
Royle's attack. She had been searching through the words of Harry
Rames all the while when he was uttering them for a glimpse of some
other being beside the man on the make. Certain qualities she
recognized. Enthusiasm, for instance. But it was enthusiasm for the
arena, not for any cause to be won there. A shrewd foresight again was
evident. But it was foresight to pluck the personal advantage. Here,
it seemed to her, was the conscience of the country stirring on all
sides to the recognition of great and unnecessary evils in its midst,
and Harry Rames was alone unaffected. Yet in a measure she was
impressed. He had so closely laid his plans. He gave her yet more
evidence when he came again.

"I have got a rule or two," he said. "All demands for pledges from
leagues and associations go into the waste-paper basket. I'll answer
questions if they are asked me by a man in my constituency. I won't
put my name to a general proposition and post it to London. Many a
good man has been let down that way. Then I won't canvass. I won't
solicit a vote. I don't believe in it. There's one only point of view
for a candidate: that the electors are doing themselves a service by
electing him, and not doing him one. You have got to persuade them of
that."

"Don't you find it difficult?" asked Cynthia, innocently.

Rames laughed.

"Yes, I do," he said. "The electors have their point of view, too. But
I won't canvass, I am there at my hotel if any one wants to see me. I
am at public meetings, and I go to social functions. That's a good
move," and Captain Rames nodded his head. "You meet the fellows on the
other side and if you can get them friendly, you stop them coming out
hot against you. Makes a lot of difference, that. Then there's wisdom
in taking a firm stand upon a point or so. Your own people, treat them
properly, will always give you a bit of latitude, and a reputation for
courage is a fine asset in politics as in anything else."

"But you mustn't overdo it, I suppose," said Cynthia ironically.

"Oh, no, you must be careful about that," replied Rames seriously.
"What you want to produce is an impression that you are not pliable,
that industries will be safe under your watch--that's for the business
men--and that social advancement will not be neglected--that's for the
artisans. You know the election is coming now," he suddenly exclaimed.
"Do come to one of my meetings!"

Cynthia looked doubtful.

"I don't think," she said, "that I believe very much in any work
which--I don't express what I mean very well--which hasn't a great
dream at the heart of it."

Rames looked up into her face quickly and grew suddenly serious. He
made no comment upon her words, however.

"After all that's no reason why you shouldn't come to one of my
meetings."

Cynthia smiled.

"I will come to the last one on the night before the poll," she
replied reluctantly.

"I shall hold you to it," said Harry Rames, and he went away well
pleased with his visit. Cynthia was popular in Ludsey. So Cynthia
should sit on that momentous evening in the front row upon the
platform. Also he would make for her benefit an unusually effective
speech. Cynthia from the window watched his motor-car spin away in a
whirl of dust. He was going to preside that evening at a meeting of
the Salvation Army.

The dissolution took place on the fifteenth of January. But the real
contest had begun a fortnight before in Ludsey. Harry Rames rushed
into it as if it had been a foot-ball rally. He spoke all day, in
factories and outside factories, in halls and schoolrooms and from
club-room windows. He ransacked the morning papers for new pegs on
which to hang his arguments; he kicked off at foot-ball matches and
the aim of the kick was entirely political; and at the end of three
weeks even he was very tired and inclined to recognize an element of
humiliation in the conduct of a successful campaign.

It was eleven o'clock at night. There was to be but one more day of
it, but one more meeting to-morrow night, the big, final rally on the
eve of the poll. Harry Rames lay outstretched upon his sofa with his
pipe between his lips cradled pleasantly upon that reflection, when
the door of his room opened and a waiter brought in a card. Rames
waved it aside.

"I can see no one."

"The gentleman said that his business was important."

Rames grumbled and took the card from the salver.

"M. Poizat," he read. "A Frenchman. Certainly not. I won't see him."

The waiter, an old English servant, a rare being nowadays, even in a
country hotel, stood his ground.

"He's lived in Ludsey a long time, sir."

"Oh, has he!" said Rames. "Tell him I am out."

The waiter shook his head.

"He has already told me that you are in, sir. Come, you had better see
him, sir. Perhaps he's the ha'porth of tar."

"Oh, very well," said Rames. "But I tell you, William, that I am in
the mood to assert my rights as a man."

"Mustn't do that, sir, until the day after to-morrow. You are only a
candidate till then."

William retired. Rames fell back upon his sofa. He meant to lie there
prone upon his back, even if his visitor held all the votes of Ludsey
in the hollow of his hand. Then the door opened and was shut again. A
little, puckish old man stood in the room, danced lightly on his feet,
skipped in the air, twirled before Captain Rames's astonished eyes and
finally struck an inviting attitude, both arms extended and one foot
advanced, like the pictures of the quack doctors in the newspaper
advertisements.

"Oh, he's out of a lunatic asylum," Captain Rames almost groaned
aloud. "He won't even have a vote."

The little man skimmed forward with agility, fixing a bright and
twinkling pair of eyes upon the prostrate candidate.

"How old do you think I am?" he asked, and he whirled his arms.

"You are the youngest thing I have ever seen," replied Rames with
conviction. "I didn't know that people were even born as young as you
are."

"I am seventy-three," exclaimed the little man with a chuckle. He
squared up at an imaginary antagonist and delivered a deadly blow in
the air.

"Do you mind not doing that!" said Rames mildly. "My nerves are not
what they should be, and if you do it again I shall probably cry. I
suppose that you are M. Poizat----"

"I am, sir," said the little man. He changed his tactics. He no longer
whirled his arms in the air. He advanced to the sofa and suddenly put
up his foot on the edge.

"Feel my calf!" he said abruptly.

Captain Rames meekly obeyed.

"You ought to have a medal," he said languidly. "You really ought. At
seventy-three, too! For myself I am like butter, and rather inferior
butter, on a very hot day."

M. Poizat nodded his head.

"I know. That's why I am here!" He looked about the room and with the
importance of a conspirator he drew out of his pocket a medicine
bottle filled with a brown liquid. "Why am I so young?" he asked. "Why
is my leg of iron? Listen to my voice. Why is it so clear?--It's all
'Lungatine,'" and with immense pride he reverently placed the bottle
on the mantel-shelf. He turned again to Captain Rames.

"I heard you to-night. I suffered with you. What a voice! How harsh!
How terrible! And yet what good words if only one could have heard
them! I said to myself: 'That poor man. I can cure him. He does not
know of Lungatine. He makes us all uncomfortable because he does not
know of Lungatine.' So I ran home and brought a bottle."

"It's very good of you, I am sure," said Rames, "But look!" He pointed
to a table. Throat sprays, tonics, lozenges, encumbered it. "The
paraphernalia of a candidate," he said.

M. Poizat smiled contemptuously. He drew from his breast pocket a
sheaf of letters.

"See how many in Ludsey owe their health to me!" he cried, and he gave
the letters to Rames, who read them over with an 'oh' and an 'ah' of
intense admiration when any particularly startling cure was gratefully
recorded.

"You are a chemist here I suppose--naturalized, of course?" asked
Captain Rames.

"I have a restaurant," M. Poizat corrected him. "Lungatine is merely
one of my discoveries."

He sat down complacently. Captain Rames started up in dismay upon his
elbow.

"I have a great deal to do to-morrow," he said piteously. The plea was
of no avail. Captain Rames was in the grip of that most terrible of
all constituents, the amateur inventor. M. Poizat drew his chair to
the side of the sofa and went through the tale of his inventions. It
was the usual inevitable list--an automatic lift which would work with
absolute safety in any mine, a torpedo which would destroy any navy, a
steel process which would resist any torpedo, and a railway-coupling.

"I'll bring you the models," he cried.

"No, no," cried Rames, springing from his sofa in dismay. Then he laid
his hand on the inventor's shoulder and smiled wisely:

"Royal commissions for you," he said. "They're the fellows for models.
I'll see about some. Royal commissions for you. Thank you for your
Lungatine. Good-night, my friend, good-night."

Gently, but firmly, he raised the inventor from his chair, while he
shook hands with him, and conducted him toward the door.

"You have your hat? Yes."

"A tablespoonful six times a day in a wineglass of water."

"Yes. The instructions, I see, are on the bottle."

Captain Rames opened the door with his pleasantest smile.

"To-morrow at your great meeting," said M. Poizat, "I shall be there.
I shall hear what you say. Your voice will ring like a trumpet. And
perhaps at the end of your speech, you will say that it is all due to
Lungatine."

A frosty silence followed upon the words. Captain Rames said
indifferently:

"You have been in England a long time. You are naturalized, of
course?"

M. Poizat did not reply to the question.

"Perhaps you will say that it is all due to Lungatine," he repeated
softly. "Perhaps you will say that. Who knows?"

Captain Rames looked up at the ceiling.

"Ah, who knows?" he said enigmatically.

M. Poizat shook hands for a second time and went down the stairs.
Captain Rames closed the door, took the cork from the bottle, wetted
the tips of his finger, and tasted the brown liquid. It was a simple
solution of paregoric.

"I don't believe the fellow's naturalized," cried Rames, and he raised
the bottle in the air above the coal-scuttle. But he did not let it
drop.

"Perhaps he is though," he thought. He poured away a portion of the
liquid amongst the coal, replaced the cork, and set the bottle
prominently upon the mantel-shelf so that if M. Poizat took it into
his head to call again he would see it there. Then he betook himself
to bed; and M. Poizat figured in his dreams, a grotesque, little,
capering creature, a figure of fun, as indeed he was, to the eyes of
wakefulness. There are people upon whose faces nature writes plainly
hints of tragic destinies, and M. Poizat had certainly no relationship
with these. But then nature is apt to be freakish.

                             CHAPTER XIII

                      THE NIGHT BEFORE THE POLL

The walls of the great Corn Exchange were draped with banners and hung
with gigantic mottoes. Cynthia sat in the front row of chairs upon the
platform with Isaac Benoliel upon one side of her, and beyond him
Diana Royle. It was the first public meeting at which she had ever
been present, and now that the shy uneasiness at the prominence of her
position which had troubled her when she took her seat was passing
away, she gazed about her, eagerness in her eyes and a throb of
excitement at her heart. In front of her a rostrum had been built out
from the edge of the platform so that the speakers might stand upon
the exact spot whence the voice carried with the greatest sonority.
The rostrum was railed and hung with red cloth; the chairman's table,
with the inevitable water-bottle, occupied it; and the small, square
space was the only empty space in all that cavern of a hall. A few
rows of chairs for members of the association were ranged at the front
upon the floor; behind the chairs the people stood packed and massed
to the doors, most of them men. The one gallery was crowded to its
furthest nook; behind Cynthia the platform was thronged. Wherever her
eyes turned she saw faces, faces, faces, all set in one direction, all
white under the glare of light, all inclined toward the empty rostrum.
It was the eve of the poll. There was a tingle of excitement in the
air, a hushed expectancy. Only when Cynthia raised her eyes did she
lose the vague feeling of suspense. Overhead a skylight in the roof
was covered with a horizontal blind. One tattered corner hung down and
as she looked up from the indistinguishable throng of faces, it
arrested her attention as something especially individual and definite
and single.

Suddenly came a buzz and a stir. The chairman was seen to rise from a
flight of steps at the side of the platform. He was followed by a
tall, gaunt, loose-limbed man with a bony face, a white moustache, and
a high, bald head. He had the look of a soldier. Cynthia took no heed
of him. He stalked before her and sank unnoticed in his place. Behind
him came Harry Rames, and as he passed along the narrow gangway
between the crowded chairs, those who had seats sprang to their feet;
and three thousand people broke like a wave into a flutter of
handkerchiefs and a shattering thunder of applause. Above the applause
a chant gradually swelled, two lines of a tune rather like a chime.
Cynthia could not hear the words, but the sound, with its rise and
fall, surged backward and forward against the walls of the Exchange
for a full minute.

Mr. Benoliel leaned toward Cynthia.

"They have given him their foot-ball song. In a city of artisans, keen
on foot-ball, that's a good sign."

Cynthia nodded. But she hardly heard, she could not have answered.
Here was something quite new to her, and overwhelmingly new. The
thunderous outburst had taken her by the throat; for a second she felt
choked; she had no part in politics, yet emotion woke in her and the
tears sprang into her eyes.

"What's the matter, Cynthia?" asked Diana Royle.

Cynthia replied with a break in her voice between a laugh and a sob.

"I don't know. It's just the crowd, I think."

"And the enthusiasm of the crowd," added Mr. Benoliel. "You make me
feel very old, Cynthia. I can listen to it quite unmoved now. But
there was a time when I couldn't without a choking in my throat. It's
the splendid faith of the crowd."

Cynthia, arrested by the phrase, looked quickly at Benoliel. Greatly
as she liked him she was never quite sure of him. Kind as he had been
to her she always suspected some touch of the charlatan. He had the
look of a man quite in earnest.

"I wonder," she said, "whether mere magnetism is enough to arouse it."

Mr. Benoliel did not answer; for the chairman rose at his table; and
while he spoke the harmless necessary words, Cynthia took stock of
Harry Rames, who was seated in the rostrum at the side of the table in
front of her and a little to her left. The last weeks of exertion had
left their marks; the flesh had worn thin upon his face; there were
dark hollows beneath his eyes; he had gained a look of spirituality
which did not belong to him. He was nervous; his hands, with the long
fingers which never seemed to accord with the rest of him, moved
uneasily and restlessly from the buttons of his coat to the slip of
notes which he had placed upon the table. Cynthia was deceived by the
look of him as she had been deceived by the fervor of the gathering.
The outburst was not entirely, was not even chiefly, a tribute to the
candidate. Ludsey was a political city, and by three weeks of speeches
and agitation political feeling had been whipped to a climax of
excitement. It sought and found its outlet to-night at this final
rally before the poll.

The cheers broke out again when Harry Rames rose and leaned his
hand upon the rail of the rostrum. When they died down he began to
speak--first a faltering word or two of thanks. Then his voice
suddenly strengthened and rang firm. His fingers ceased to twitch, and
he turned over in his mind the consecutions of his thoughts as though
he were turning over the pages of a book. All that he had planned to
say came clearly to him in its due order, and brought the comforting
assurance that the rest would follow. He was master of himself, and
being master of himself set his audience at ease to listen, Cynthia
among the rest. Anxious as he himself, she knew now that the speech
would go right on to its considered end. She leaned forward, all ears
to catch the words, and all eagerness to read into them, if she could,
the something more which was not there.

But she could not; yet it was a night of triumph for Harry Rames,
"Breezy Harry Rames." She recalled her own phrase with a disappointed
droop of the lips more than once during the next hour. He was going to
win. She had no doubt of it. Confidence swept from his audience to him
and back again in waves. And he savored the joys of the orator as he
never had before. He had the arts of the platform, and more than the
arts, a power to bend his audience to sympathy. He knew that night the
supreme reward, the hush of a mass of people constraining themselves
to silence and even to immobility while a voice, low as a whisper,
sounded audibly in every nook. He played with the suspense, prolonging
it to the last moment of endurance, and then, by a sudden swoop to a
sharp, clever phrase, drawing the audience to its feet and coining the
silence in a stormy tumult of applause.

He had the gift of speech; Cynthia gladly conceded it. An aptness of
homely words, an absence of all extravagance, and a voice resonant and
pleasant as a clear-toned, bell impressed her more than she had
expected to be impressed. A day's rest had restored his voice for the
time, even though M. Poizat's Lungatine had not contributed to the
restoration.

She was surprised, too, by a certain shrewdness in the matter of the
speech. It was not so much of the platform as his manner. There was
very little reference to the navy. "I don't mean to be considered a
'service member,'" he had said to her once. "No one pays attention to
the service member in the House of Commons." But here and there came
views which struck her as new and worth consideration.

"If you could teach the wives of the artisans to cook and to take an
interest in cooking, you would have done a great deal more to solve
the question of intemperance in this country than if you closed half
the public-houses," he cried once and developed his theme with humor
and some courage. He drew a picture of a wife putting her husband's
supper on the fire, ready against the time when he should come home
from his factory, and then running out into the street to talk to a
neighbor and leaving the meat to grill to the toughness and dryness of
leather.

"The man comes home, sits down to it, and rises from it unsatisfied.
What does he do? He goes out and strolls round to the public-house.
Put a good meal, well-cooked, inside of him, and he'll not be so
disposed to move. He'll be inclined to smoke his pipe by the fire in
his kitchen."

He passed on to other topics. The whole speech was clever and was
uttered on a lift of enthusiasm. But again Cynthia argued, it was the
enthusiasm for the arena, not for a cause. It was ambition without
ideals, power without high motive.

Diana Royle inclined toward her.

"Aren't you satisfied now?" she asked.

"Oh, he will get on," said Cynthia; and then she suddenly sat upright
in her chair, with her lips parted and the blood bright in her cheeks.

"But, after all," Rames was saying; his voice was beginning to grow
hoarse and he raised his hand in an appeal for silence, "here are we
discussing the work to be done, and leaving out in our discussion the
great necessity. I don't know what you think, but to my notion there
is no greatness in any work unless it has a dream at the heart of it.
The world's work is done by the great dreamers. Well, here is my last
word before the poll, perhaps the last word I shall speak in this
constituency."

He was interrupted as he had meant to be by loud repudiations of such
a possibility.

"No, no!"

"You're a member already."

"We'll put you in."

Such phrases broke in upon the words and then a cheery voice, louder
than the rest, shouted from the back of the hall:

"Never fear! You're well patronized in Ludsey, Captain."

A burst of laughter followed upon the words, and a flush of annoyance
darkened Rames's face.

"I will remind my friend that I am not a public entertainer," he said.
"And it's really against the spirit represented in that sentence that
I wish to direct my first words. I have my dream too--a dream. I speak
openly to you--at my very heart. Let me tell it you. It involves a
confession. When I first came to Ludsey six months ago, when for the
first time I saw from the windows of my railway carriage across the
summer fields the tall chimneys and high, long roofs of its factories,
the delicate steeples of its churches, it was to me just a town like
another. I will be frank, it was just a polling-booth. But as I got to
know your city that error passed out of my thoughts."

Cynthia leaned forward. He had used her own words. She could not but
be flattered by his use of them. They had been acclaimed, too, by this
great gathering, and she was proud of that. Not for anything would she
have had their authorship revealed, but she was proud to hear them
used, proud, too, because they seemed to have led, if she dared
believe her ears, Harry Rames out of his detested breeziness into a
contemplation of something other than the personal gain. She could
hardly doubt him now; he spoke with so simple a sincerity. She had a
sudden glimpse once more of her enchanted garden wherein she had
walked with and helped the great ones of the earth. To help, herself
unknown except by those she helped!--that had been the dream when she
had encouraged dreams; and it sprang once more into life now as she
listened.

"It is a city," Rames continued, "where a few steps will take you out
of the thronged streets into some old garden, quiet with the peace of
ancient memories; some old close of plaster and black beams; some old
room with windows deep-set in four-foot walls and wide hearths of
centuries ago. And round about these old places stands a ring of
factories where in good times the lights blaze until the morning and
the whir of its machines never ceases from your ears. It is a city
whose continuous life is written for all to see upon its buildings.
Here kings and queens have tarried on their journeys; there chambers
of commerce hold their meetings. From small and ancient beginnings it
has been made by the activity of generations of men into a modern
industrial city. Well, I have my dream. It is to be one little link in
the continuity of its life and to do my share of service in the
forwarding of its prosperity."

A shout answered his words. He had his audience in hand. He stilled it
with a swift gesture and his voice rang out with a laugh which had all
the exultation of battle.

"Well, we shall know to-morrow night. We are in the ice-pack now, but
we are coming to the outer rim of it. We can see the blue water
already. We shall be sailing smoothly upon it this time to-morrow
night."

He had been chary of references to the voyage which had made his
reputation; all the more, therefore, this one struck home. He sat down
tempestuously acclaimed, and turning in his chair held out his hand to
Cynthia Daventry.

"I am glad that you came," he said. "I have achieved two triumphs
to-night. I have brought you and Mr. Benoliel to your first political
meeting and both of you are on my platform."

He shook hands with Isaac Benoliel and with Diana Royle. Cynthia
leaned a little forward.

"I, too, am glad that I came," she returned with a smile. Because of
those last words of his, friendship was warm in her toward Harry
Rames. She added, "You knew then that I was here--just behind you?"

Rames nodded.

"Yes, but I was too nervous to turn to you before I had made my
speech. The flesh wears a little thin after three weeks of this. One
gets jumpy. Even the tattered corner of blind hanging down there from
the skylight seemed to-night charged with some important message." He
spoke, ridiculing the fancy, and Cynthia, with a smile and a quick
lift of her eyebrows, cried:

"I noticed that too."

"Then for the first time," said Rames, "we have something in common.
You and I are probably the only people in the hall who noticed it. We
have a bond of union."

"A strip of tattered blind!" said Cynthia.

"Well, there was nothing at all before," said Captain Rames, and he
suddenly turned back to his seat. For the tall, gaunt man was on his
legs.

Cynthia neither heard his name nor followed his speech with any
particular attention. It was indeed difficult to follow. He was an old
hack of the platform with all the sounding phrases at the tip of his
tongue. Rolling sentences, of the copybook, flowed out of him;
declamations too vague to be understood were delivered with the vigor
of a prophet. But he interspersed them with the familiar clichés of
the day and each one received its salvo of applause. To Cynthia he was
a man not so much stupid as out of place. She could imagine him at the
head of a cavalry squadron. Here he seemed simply grotesque.

On the other hand, Captain Rames did not; and the contrast between the
two men bent her to consider whether, after all, she had not been
wrong in her condemnation of his new career. She was in the mood to
admit it; and when the meeting broke up and the crowd was pouring
through the doors into the street, and those upon the platform were
descending its steps, she found herself alone for a second on the
rostrum with Harry Rames.

"Perhaps I was wrong," she said. "I remember what you told me of Mr.
Smale. A vivid gift of phrase--he thought that necessary. You have
it."

"On the platform--yes. But the platform's not the House," said Rames.
"Smale told me that too. I have yet to see whether I shall carry the
House."

"Yet those last words," said Cynthia--"about the city and the
continuity of its life and your pride to have a little share in it.
Oh, that was finely done."

And upon Rames's face there came a grin.

"Yes, I thought that would fetch 'em," he said.

Cynthia stepped back. Once again it occurred to Rames, as it had done
on the night of their first meeting at the Admiralty, that just so
would she look if he struck her a blow.

"Then--then--the city is still a polling-booth," she stammered.

"Yes," said Rames.

The hero newly perched upon his pediment tumbled off again.

"You used what I said to you because you just thought it would go
down."

Rames did not deny it. He remained silent.

"I remember," she continued, "it was no doubt a foolish thing I said.
But even when I said it, you were thinking this is the sort of thing
that will take."

That she was humiliated, her voice and her face clearly proved. Yet
again Rames did not contradict her. Again he was silent. For there was
nothing to be said.

"You do not allow me many illusions about you," Cynthia said gently,
and she began to turn away.

But now he arrested her.

"I don't mean to," he said quickly; and by the reply he undid some
portion of the harm he had done himself in her eyes.

                             CHAPTER XIV

                      COLONEL CHALLONER'S MEMORY

It had been arranged that Mr. Benoliel's small party should take
supper with Harry Rames at his hotel. As they stood waiting at the
foot of the platform the agent came to them from the outer doors.

"The way's clear now," he said. "I think you can go."

They passed through the empty hall, Cynthia first at Harry Rames's
side, and in that order they came out upon the steps. A fine rain was
falling, but the crowd had not dispersed. The great light over the
door showed the climbing street thronged. Coat collars were turned up,
hats were pressed down; and so as Rames and Cynthia came out they saw
in the glare beneath the rain just a mass of swaying, jostling black
things, round black things moving indecisively this way and that like
some close-packed herd of blind animals. Just for a moment the
illusion lasted. Then Rames was seen and of a sudden the heads were
thrown back, the hats shaken high, and all those black round things
became the white faces of living men, their eyes shining in the light,
their voices shouting in acclamation.

Captain Rames took a step back.

"Did you see?" he cried to Cynthia.

"Yes. They are not animals to draw your chariot," she replied. "They
are men."

"Yes, men--men to govern," he answered. His was the spirit of the old
Whig families. Though he was not of them, he meant to force his way
among them. To govern the people, not to admit it to government, to go
far in appeasing it, but not to give it the reins, that was his
instinct. He wished to retain the old governing class, but he meant to
be one of it. His ambitions soared to-night, and reached out beyond
this hilly, narrow street. He led these men now who stood acclaiming
him in the rain. His thoughts shot forward to other days when every
town in England might at his coming pour out its masses to endorse his
words.

He waved his hand toward his companions and the crowd made a lane for
them across the street to the hotel. Rames himself was carried
shoulder-high, and set down within the doors. He led the way up the
stairs to a big room upon the first floor overlooking the street,
where supper was laid. A great shout went up from the street as they
entered the room.

"They want you," said Mrs. Royle.

"No," replied Rames. He opened a door into a smaller room in which no
lights were lit and pulled up the blinds. Across the street under a
great clock was a newspaper office and in the windows the election
returns of the night were being, displayed. All along the line
victories were gained for Rames's party. Arthur Pynes, a young
manufacturer, and the chairman of the association, to whose energy the
organization was due; an ex-Mayor, a Mr. Charlesworth, and one or two
hard fighters of the old school joined the group in the dark room. One
of them, a rosy-faced contractor with a high laugh, who had presided
over the association in its darker days, leaned against the window by
Cynthia Daventry.

"He'll have to appear on this balcony to-morrow night, as soon as he
can after the result's declared," he said. "You see, the windows are
all boarded up on the ground floors opposite."

"He'll speak from here?" asked Cynthia.

"He'll speak, but they won't listen," replied Mr. Arnall. "I remember
Sir William Harris, the last time he was elected before he was made a
judge--" and he ran off into stories of the old days until the windows
of the newspaper office were darkened and the crowd at last dispersed.

"Let us go in to supper," said Rames, and they all passed into the
next room. "Will you sit here, Mrs. Royle, and you here, Miss
Daventry?" He placed Diana Royle upon his right hand and Cynthia upon
his left. "Pynes, will you take the chair next to Mrs. Royle, and
Colonel," he addressed the tall, gaunt man whose flowing platitudes
had left nothing in Cynthia's mind but a recollection of sonority, a
booming as of waves in a hollow cave, "will you sit next to Miss
Daventry?"

The colonel bowed and prepared to take his seat. But he was a
punctilious old gentleman and stood upon the ceremonies.

"You have not introduced me, Rames," he said.

"I beg your pardon. Miss Daventry, this is Colonel Challoner. He
has made his own seat a safe one--a county division which polls
a week later than we do, and he lives in it. So when I applied at
head-quarters for help at our last meeting Colonel Challoner was kind
enough to volunteer."

Cynthia shot a startled glance at her neighbor. Her own name was
Challoner too; and all that was terrible in her recollections was
linked with it. Of course, it did not follow that this Challoner was
any relation of hers. There must be many families of that name.
Nevertheless, the sudden sound of it caused her a shock. The blood
rushed into her face. She made a movement. Almost she shrank away.
Challoner, however, was taking his seat. He noticed the quick
movement; he did not appreciate the instinct of fear which had caused
it.

"Ah, it is true then, Miss Daventry," he said. "We have already met.
You remember it, too."

Cynthia was startled.

"No, Colonel Challoner," she replied quickly. "I don't think that we
have. Indeed, I am sure we have not. I should surely have remembered
if we had."

"That is a pretty thing for a young lady to say to an old man," the
colonel answered with a smile. "But my memory is a good one. I never
forget a face."

He had the particular pride of all men with good memories, and
ambition had intensified it into an obstinacy. For he had his
ambition, and successive disappointments had only strengthened its
hold upon his heart. He aimed to be Under Secretary of State for
Foreign Affairs. He had been military attaché at so many Embassies,
the post, to his thinking, was marked out for him. At each new
promotion to the Cabinet, at each general election, he was sure that
he could no longer be overlooked. He ran from platform to platform to
increase his claim upon the office should his party be returned. A
telegram from the chief whip had brought him to Ludsey, would send him
to-morrow into Yorkshire. Now, surely, his turn must come! He had one
persistent fear, lest he should be thought too old. And he clung with
an almost piteous reiteration to the accuracy of his recollections as
a vindication of the alertness of his powers.

"When I saw you upon the platform I was quite sure that it was not for
the first time, Miss Daventry," he insisted.

"During the season, perhaps," Cynthia replied. "At some reception or
ball. Did you hear that, Colonel Challoner?" and she turned quickly
toward Mr. Arnall, who was telling an old story of the days and the
hustings when broken heads were common about the doors of the
polling-booths.

Cynthia laughed eagerly with the rest in her anxiety to keep Colonel
Challoner from plying her with questions. She was ready with her
answers, but greatly she feared, lest by probing into his memories he
should understand of a sudden where he had seen her before. And for a
time she was successful. The confidence which had run from man to
man in the great Corn Exchange an hour before was present at this
supper-table and kindled them all to cheeriness. The ex-Mayor said
with a pleasant drawl, which was his habit:

"Do you remember Taylor the Democrat, Arnall? He fought two elections
here within three months and then went bankrupt. He was an adventurer
and the most eloquent man I ever heard. But he was a caution."

"Yes," cried Mr. Arnall, with a clicking laugh at the back of his
throat. "Do you remember his meeting down by the club? 'Gag that
calf,'" and Mr. Arnall spluttered with delight.

"That's it," said the ex-Mayor. "You must know that Taylor stood as a
Democrat, Captain Rames. That's where the fun comes in. He wore a blue
swallow-tail-coat with brass buttons and his hair down to his
shoulders. 'Your father was a miller,' one fellow shouted from the
crowd. 'Gag that calf,' cried Taylor and he held up his arms in the
air. 'Look at these fair hands. No work has ever sullied them.' That
did him all right."

A quiet, elderly man leaned over the table.

"Did you notice the flag upon the chairman's table, Captain Rames?" he
asked. "It was woven out of Ludsey silk fifty years ago. It's the true
Ludsey blue. My father wove it for Sir William Harris's first
election, and the other fellows swore they would have it on the
polling-day. But we carried it about the streets from morning to
evening, with twelve big fellows to protect it. It was nearly down
once, I remember. I was a lad at the time--at the corner of Stapley's
Lane. But we saved it and it was your table-cloth to-night, Captain
Rames. It brought us victory then. It will again to-morrow."

The stories were continued. They were often not very pointed; often
enough the humor was far to seek; but they were alive. They were told
with infinite enjoyment, and the smallest details were remembered over
decades. Cynthia began now to listen to them for their own sake; she
was learning with surprise the value of politics to the lives of men
in a busy city of the provinces. But the colonel at her elbow was not
longer to be diverted.

"I think it must have been in Dorsetshire that we met," he said. "I
live near to Wareham."

Cynthia looked at him quite steadily.

"I have never been in Dorsetshire in my life, Colonel Challoner."

"Yet I associate you with that county," he persisted. "Now, why should
I do that, Miss Daventry? You have not been to my house, I know. For
since my wife died and my son went away, I have not had so many young
people to stay with me as I should have liked."

From the moment when Colonel Challoner had claimed her recognition,
Cynthia had not doubted that she was sitting next to a relation. And
Colonel Challoner's location of his home in Dorsetshire, near to
Wareham, had confirmed her belief. She knew quite well how it came
about that he had seemed to recognize her, that he associated her with
his own parish. She knew because upon one unforgettable night she had
crouched in a great chair in a dark room and through the panels of a
door had heard her father claim her as his daughter. He, too, had
recognized her as Colonel Challoner now did, and just by the same
means. For there was a Romney hanging upon the dining-room wall in
that house near Wareham which might have been a portrait of herself.
But until this moment she had not guessed what degree of relationship
bound her to the old man at her side.

Now, however, she knew that too. The hesitation, the gentle
wistfulness with which he had spoken of his son struck home at her.
She was this man's granddaughter. She was moved by what he had said. A
big house empty of young people must be a place of melancholy and
hollow as a shell. Yet she would not reveal herself. She had it fixed
now as an instinct of her nature that she would never wear the name of
Challoner, nor admit a link with any of that name.... But she turned
toward her grandfather with a greater sympathy.

"You have given up your whole life to politics now?" she asked, and a
wave of pity swept through her. It could not be possible that he
should win any success in that sphere, and she was young and could
hardly conceive of life at all without success.

"Yes. I left the army twenty-five years ago. Sometimes I think that I
may have made a mistake," he answered. "But it is too late for me to
go back upon a mistake, even were I sure that I had made one. Politics
is all I have now. I have no longer any family. And I have politics in
my bones. I do not know what I should do if I lost my seat. I should
probably die." He spoke with absolute simplicity, absolute sincerity:
Cynthia was greatly moved. An old futile man without wife or family in
a big, empty house, feeding himself from day to day with the
disappointments of a hopeless ambition--it made for her a dismal
picture. She contrasted it with the other one before her eyes--Harry
Rames at the head of the table, confident, comfortable, young as
politicians go, with the world a smooth sea for his conquering sails;
and once again an unaccountable resentment against Harry Rames flared
up within her. Almost she wished that for once he might fail. Almost
she revealed herself then to Colonel Challoner. But she did not. She
had painfully learned a great gift--silence.

She knew very well with what relief she would wake on the morrow to
the recollection that she was still Cynthia Daventry and not Cynthia
Challoner.

"I expect that what I say will sound extravagant to you, Miss
Daventry," Colonel Challoner continued. "You at your age could hardly
understand it."

The spell which was upon Cynthia was broken. She looked thoughtfully
about the table.

"I should not have understood it an hour ago. I was inclined to think
it really didn't matter very much in the long run who was in and who
was out, that the things which wanted doing and which legislation
could do, would get themselves done sooner or later by one side or the
other and perhaps by both; and that for the rest the nation went on
its way, leaving the talk and the honors to the politicians because it
had no time for either and doing the work itself."

Colonel Challoner laughed.

"That's a definite point of view, at all events."

"I expect that I was drawing my ideas from another--" she was about to
say "country," but checked herself lest she should be asked what
country and so put Colonel Challoner on the track of her relationship
to him. She went on hastily: "But since I have been sitting here, I
have learned how much of color politics can bring into the lives of
men."

And Colonel Challoner looked at her and cried:

"That's it, Miss Daventry. Color! That's the great need. That's why
the quack religions flourish in the back streets. We all need it--all
except the man there at the head of the table," and Colonel Challoner
looked a trifle enviously at Harry Rames. "He has it and to spare."

The door opened by a few inches at this moment and a wrinkled pippin
of a head was pushed in. A pair of little bright eyes surveyed the
company and then the door was thrust wide open and M. Poizat stepped
lightly in.

Harry Rames rose and shook hands with the little Frenchman. Colonel
Challoner stroked his white moustache.

"You were present to-night?" said Rames. "What a difference, eh?"

"Yes, I was proud," M. Poizat returned. "But always I waited for some
little word--some little word which did not come."

"One always forgets an important point and generally the most
important. It is the experience of all speakers," said Rames. He
turned to the table. "I must introduce to you M. Poizat, and if ever
your voices are hoarse in Ludsey, please ask for Lungatine."

Rames drew a chair to the table, pressed M. Poizat into it, and filled
for him a glass of champagne. The little man was delighted. He drank
Captain Rames's health, he bowed to the company; and his hand was
arrested in mid-air, holding the wine-glass by its stem. Colonel
Challoner was gazing fixedly across the table at him. A look of
trouble took all the merriment out of M. Poizat's face.

"I have seen you before, M. Poizat," said Colonel Challoner.

Cynthia began to think that the colonel had a mania for recognizing
people.

"I am _Mr_. Poizat, an Englishman," the little confectioner answered
hurriedly.

"Naturalized," said the colonel.

"It is true," said M. Poizat reluctantly.

"If you had only said that last night," thought Harry Rames. "You
would have got your advertisement, my friend."

But he said not a word aloud, and M. Poizat continued:

"But it was a long time ago. And all the years since I have spent in
Ludsey."

Colonel Challoner shook his head.

"It was not in Ludsey that I saw you. For I was never here in my life
before."

M. Poizat shrugged his shoulders.

"We have sat opposite to one another in a train perhaps. We have run
against one another in the traffic of a London street."

"No, it was on some occasion more important. I do not forget a face."

"Nor I," said M. Poizat. "And I have never seen yours, sir, until this
moment;" and though he spoke with spirit his uneasiness was apparent
to every one at that table.

Colonel Challoner sat back in his chair and let the subject drop. But
he was not satisfied. He was even annoyed at his failure to identify
the Frenchman, and he sat relentlessly revolving in his mind the
changing scenes of his life. Meanwhile the talk drifted back to
by-gone elections and this or that great night when some famous
statesman was brought into the town and never allowed to speak one
audible word. Mr. Arnall mentioned one whose name resounded through
England.

"Next night in Warrington he said that he had been struggling with the
beasts at Ephesus," said Mr. Arnall with a chirrup of delight. The old
Adam was strong in him at this moment and his own solemn exhortations
to hear all sides clean forgotten. Suddenly Colonel Challoner broke in
upon him. He leaned across the table and with a smile of triumph
stared between the candles at M. Poizat.

"It was in a corridor," he said, "a vast bare corridor--somewhere--a
long time ago. You were coming out of a room--wait!--wait!--No, I
cannot name the place," and he sank back again disappointed.

But M. Poizat's face wore now a sickly pallor.

"In no corridor--nowhere," he stammered and his eyes, urgent with
appeal, turned toward Harry Rames.

Harry Rames did his first service for an elector of Ludsey. He glanced
toward Mr. Benoliel, who rose.

"It is getting late," said Benoliel, "and Rames has a busy day in
front of him."

"I will order your motor-car round to the door," said Rames. He rang
the bell and the rest of the company left the table. Diana Royle and
Cynthia sought their cloaks in the adjoining sitting-room. Harry Rames
took M. Poizat by the arm and led him to the door.

"I am very grateful to you," he said. "Good-night." And even as M.
Poizat's foot was over the threshold the voice of Colonel Challoner
brought him to a halt:

"One moment. I remember now. You come from Alsace, M. Poizat."

"I come from Provence," cried the little man, facing about swiftly
with a passionate, white face.

Harry Rames had begun to think Colonel Challoner rather a bore with
his incomplete reminiscences. That thought passed from him altogether.
He had but to look at the two men to know that some queer and
unexpected moment of drama had sprung from their chance meeting at
this hotel at Ludsey. They stood facing one another, the little
Frenchman in the doorway with fear and rage contending in his face,
his mouth twisted into a snarl, his lips drawn back from his gums like
an animal, his teeth gleaming; the colonel erect above the table with
the candle-light shining upward upon a triumphant and menacing face.

"You were in Metz in '71," cried Challoner. "So was I. I was a lad at
the time. I was aide to our attaché. That's where I saw you, M.
Poizat--in the long corridor of the Arsenal. Yes, you were in Metz in
'71."

And behind M. Poizat appeared the waiter announcing that Mr.
Benoliel's motor-car was at the door.

                              CHAPTER XV

                        THE MAYOR AND THE MAN

St. Anne's Hall stands tucked away in a narrow street of Ludsey by the
spacious square; and from its ancient windows you look out between the
lozenges of stained glass upon the great church of St. Anne with its
soaring spire and its wide graveyard. Into this hall the ballot-boxes
were brought from the polling-booths on the next evening, and at long
tables in the Council Chamber the voting papers were sorted and
counted. Harry Rames walked from table to table. He seemed to see
nothing but crosses against his opponent's name. He did not dare to
put a question to any of the scrutineers standing behind the sorters.
The very swiftness with which the votes were counted impressed him
with a sense of disaster. For the first time he began to ask himself
how he was to shape his life if to-night he were defeated. Thus an
hour passed and then the chief constable drew him aside to a bench
under the musician's gallery at one end of the room.

"I've been watching the tables, Captain Rames," he said, "and I think
you are going to be elected."

"You do?" said Rames eagerly. "Yes, and I shall be very glad if you
are."

"Thank you," exclaimed Rames. He could have wrung off the chief
constable's hand in the fervor of his gratitude.

"Oh, I am not speaking as a politician," the chief constable returned
with a smile. "I have the order of my city to look after. That's all I
am thinking about. If you weren't by any chance to get in, I am afraid
there would be trouble to-night in Ludsey. And I want you if you are
returned to get back to your hotel at once. It's important from my
point of view that you should show up on your balcony as soon as
possible after the result is declared."

"I see," said Rames.

"I will take you out the back way through the police station," the
chief constable continued, "and there's a lane opposite which will
lead you straight to your back door. You had better run, I think. For
your own friends would tear you to pieces to-night without noticing
they were doing you any harm."

The chief constable suddenly changed his tone. One of the scrutineers
on the side of Rames's opponent had drawn close to them. The chief
constable had no intention to allow a suspicion that he favored one
side more than the other. He raised his voice.

"You have noticed our tapestry, perhaps. It is quite invaluable, I
believe. We lent it two years ago to the South Kensington Museum.
There was an American millionaire here the other day who wished to buy
it."

Raines looked across the room.

"Isn't there some portion of it missing?" he asked.

"Yes. That disappeared in the Commonwealth times. Let us go and look
at it."

Rames walked at the chief constable's side up the floor of the room
toward the dais where Mr. Redling the Mayor, with his chain of office
about his shoulders, sat in his big chair in the centre of the long
council table. His mace lay upon the table in front of him, and he
surveyed the busy scene over which he presided with an imperturbable
gravity. But Mr. Redling was a genial soul with a twinkling eye and a
red, round face like a crumpled cherub's; and as Harry Rames advanced
toward the dais, Mr. Redling beckoned to him with a discreet twist of
the finger of a hand lying idle upon the table.

Harry Rames took a seat beside the Mayor at the long table and again
words of comfort were poured into his ears in a gentle undertone.

"I think you are going to do it," said Mr. Redling, repeating almost
word for word the utterance of his chief constable. "Of course, I
couldn't take any part. But you know what I should have been doing if
I hadn't been Mayor, don't you? But I have asked quietly here and
there about your chance and I fancy it's all right."

He winked, and his face broke into triumphant smiles. He was a man.
Then he remembered again that he was a Mayor, and he sat a pillar of
municipal propriety.

"It's good of you to say that," cried Harry Rames in a low voice. "I
needed to hear it, I can tell you."

Mr. Redling looked at his face. The three weeks had taken a heavy toll
of him. He had thinned and sharpened; his eyes were heavy and very
tired; for the moment his buoyancy had gone.

"Yes," said Mr. Redling. "An election takes a good deal out of one.
And these two hours are the worst of it when the fight's all over and
there's nothing to do but wait. Gives you a kind of glimpse into what
women have to put up with all their lives, eh?"

Harry Rames glanced at the Mayor with interest.

"Why, I suppose that's true."

Mr. Redling nodded his head.

"Yes. It teaches you that sitting with your hands in your lap isn't
the same as sitting soft, after all."

Harry Rames felt comfort steal in upon him from the neighborhood of
the little Mayor. Mr. Redling was that rare bird, a strong politician
without a fad, and, therefore, a veritable haven of refuge to a
candidate in the cudgelling of an election. On the few afternoons when
Harry Rames had been able to snatch a half hour of leisure he had been
wont to run round to the Mayor's house and spend a restful interval
with one of the Mayor's cigars. Mr. Redling laid his Mayoralty aside
with the silk hat he invariably wore, and when he took off his chain
of office he usually took off his coat too. He had had his ups and
downs, and as he discoursed upon his city in his shirt-sleeves, Harry
Rames never failed to draw comfort from his talk, so strong a spirit
of human friendship breathed from him.

"They like you here," continued Mr. Redling; "both sides. Take us for
all in all we are not violent people. Give us the right sort of man,
and we'll be sure he won't do us harm, whatever his politics," and
then as Mr. Benoliel, who was acting as one of Rames's scrutineers,
came to him with a doubtful voting paper, he switched off to another
topic; and it happened quite naturally that he chose the very same
subject as the chief constable had done.

"Have you noticed our tapestry?" he asked. "We are proud of it. An
American gentleman, a Mr. Cronin, came over here last week with Mr.
Benoliel to see it. And after he had seen it, he wanted to buy it."

"Oh, did he?" said Benoliel as he handed the voting paper to the
Mayor. "But I might have guessed that he would. I brought him over
from Culver, and we met Mrs. Royle just outside here. She came in with
us. Mrs. Royle seemed as interested in the tapestry as Cronin
himself."

While Mr. Redling examined the voting paper, Harry Rames cast an eye
over the tapestry. The æsthetic qualities formed a quite insignificant
element in his nature. Of art he thought nothing at all. It noted in
his mind long hair and an absence of baths--such was his ignorance.
The only picture-gallery into which he had ever entered was the Royal
Academy; and the only occasion upon which he had ventured over that
threshold was the Academy dinner to which he had been invited after
his return from his Antarctic expedition. He had a primitive
appreciation of scarlet as a color and he recognized that women upon
canvas could look beautiful. There for him art ended. So he gazed at
the tapestry with a lack-lustre eye. There was no vividness of color,
and the human forms worked upon it had an angularity and a thickness
of joint which pleased him not at all.

"I suppose it's very beautiful," he said.

"It's unique," replied Mr. Benoliel; "that's why Cronin wanted it. Let
a thing be unique, he'll not trouble his head so much about its
beauty, and I am told he will ask no questions how it comes to be
offered to him."

"Well, he offered us a hundred thousand pounds," Mr. Redling remarked
with half a sigh. Ludsey was growing at a pace which made it difficult
for the borough council to keep up with it. Mr. Redling thought of
baths and schools and houses. "A hundred thousand pounds--a good deal
of money for a municipality to refuse. But of course, we did. We
couldn't let that tapestry go." He returned to the voting paper and
gave his decision upon it. Harry Rames drifted down again into the
body of the hall. He troubled no more about the priceless tapestry
swinging under the high carved roof in this ancient place. He was a
man of his own day, absorbed in its doings, and wondering always in a
great labor of thought how he might make his name familiar in all
men's mouths before nightfall swept him into the darkness. His
anxieties were now diminished, his heart beat high. For here were two
men, both experienced in elections and both convinced that he would
surely win. So the first small victory, it seemed, was won. He crossed
to the row of windows and looked down through a lozenge of white in
the painted pattern into the street below. And having once looked he
could not again withdraw his eyes.

It was a night of January, dreary and loud with a roar of falling
rain. A light wind carried the rain at a slant so that it shot down
past the street lamps like slender javelins of steel. And exposed to
that pitiless assault a silent crowd of men stood packed together in
the narrow street between St. Anne's Hall and the railings of the
church. A few, a very few, carried umbrellas over their heads, the
rest stood with their coat collars turned up about their throats and
their hands deep in their pockets. No one moved, for there was no room
to move; and all the faces were uplifted under the brims of their
soaking hats to the great window beyond the hall whence the result
should be declared. The patience of the throng, its acquiescence in
discomfort, as though discomfort were the ordinary condition of its
life, suddenly caught hold of Harry Rames. He took a step, nay, a
stride forward. Last night when he had come out of the Exchange and
the herd of animals had been transfigured into the uplifted faces of
men, his thought had been:

"This is for me."

But now his thoughts changed. The men of Ludsey did not wait in vain
that night. For Harry Rames the glamour faded off the arena. At the
very moment when the bars were being withdrawn for him to enter it the
exultation of battle died out of his heart. He woke to something
new--the claim of the constituency. The longer he looked, the stronger
the claim grew, the more loudly the silence of that throng proclaimed
and shouted it. They stood under the javelins of the rain, the men who
had voted for him. They emphasized their claim by their extraordinary
quietude. Almost they menaced.

"A queer sight," said a voice at his elbow.

Harry Rames turned. It was Mr. Arnall who had interrupted him.

"I shall not easily forget it," said Rames, drawing a breath, and then
with an irritable outburst he said: "They look to Parliament for more
than parliaments can do, to candidates for more than members can
achieve. Each election is to open paradise for them."

"And whose fault is that?" asked Mr. Arnall dryly.

Rames nodded.

"Ours, I suppose," he said; and behind him in the room there was a
bustle and a grating of chairs upon the floor. The votes had been
sorted. The candidates and their friends gathered about the long table
on the raised dais.

"They are taking yours first," said Mr. Arnall to Harry. "That's a
good sign."

The papers cast for Harry Rames were brought to the table in sets of
fifty. They were placed crosswise, one set on the top of the first,
and the third on the second, until five hundred had been counted.
Against that pile of five hundred votes a second rose. Gradually the
orderly heaps of paper extended along the table's edge in front of the
Mayor. There were half a dozen now. Rames's agent stood by them like a
bull-dog on the chain. The half-dozen became ten, eleven, twelve. And
as the twelfth heap was completed a quick movement ran among all of
Rames's friends. He had polled now half the electorate of the city.
One more set of papers and he was in.

It was laid next to the others at that moment, and Rames's hands were
silently grasped and shaken. But the heaping up of the votes went on.
There were three more piles to be added before the end was reached.
Eighty-four per cent of the electorate had recorded their votes. Harry
Rames had won by a majority well on to two thousand. He stood there in
a buzz of congratulations, with a sudden vacancy of mind and thought.
He remembered the extraordinary agility with which Mr. Redling whipped
out of the room, trying to say unconcernedly:

"I'll just announce the result at once."

He heard the storm of cheers in the street below. That patient silence
was broken now in a hurricane of enthusiasm and even through it he
could distinguish the words of the exultant cry:

"Rames is our man!"

He saw the Mayor return, much out of breath. He proposed the vote of
thanks to the returning officers, with the usual eulogy of his
opponents and depreciation of himself. But even at that moment the
claim of the constituency would importunately obtrude and find
acknowledgment in his words.

"You look to me very likely for more than I can do," he said simply.
"At all events you shall have what I can."

But the most memorable achievement that night was the reply of Mr.
Redling.

As he rose to his feet to acknowledge the vote of thanks, the man ran
forward and got a fair start of the Mayor. He cried out, all one
bubble of delight:

"I need hardly say, gentlemen, how utterly I rejoice at--" and then
the Mayor put on a spurt and caught up the man--"at the admirable
manner in which this contest has been conducted by both sides."

But the correction deceived no one. Mr. Redling's politics were known,
and so, in a general splutter of good-humored laughter, the Ludsey
election came to an end.

The Mayor turned from the table wiping his forehead.

"I nearly made a bad break there," he said in a whisper. "They won't
come at you again, I think. I reckon you have got Ludsey, Captain
Rames," and then Rames felt the hand of the chief constable laid upon
his arm. He was rushed across the Mayor's parlor, down the stairs
through the police station, where the police at their supper rose and
gave him a loud cheer.

"Silence!" cried the chief constable savagely. He opened the street
door and peeped out.

"All's clear. Run--down that alley opposite. Say something from your
balcony, never mind what--they won't hear more than two words."

"That's just all that I want them to hear," cried Rames.

He had foreseen that moment. He ran with one or two of his friends to
the back door of his hotel. A path was made for them through the
crowded hall. He came out upon the balcony, and up and down the hill
as far as his eyes could see the street was thronged. He stretched out
his hand. He had a second of absolute silence, and in that second his
voice rang out:

"My constituents----"

The roar which answered him showed him that once more his foresight
had served him well. No other word of his was heard. But any other
words would have spoiled the two which he had uttered.

                             CHAPTER XVI

                      WORDS OVER THE TELEPHONE

The next two hours were for Rames of the tissue whence nightmares are
woven. Rames was conscious that he made speeches and still more
speeches and yet others on the top of those, until speech-making
became a pain in the head for which there was no anodyne. He made them
from windows--one at that very window where Taylor, the lily fingered
democrat, had by a single sentence won immortality and certain
defeat--he made them from tables in club-rooms which he no longer
recognized; where men, packed tight as herrings, screamed
incoherencies in a blaze of light and the atmosphere of a Turkish
bath, or standing upon chairs beat him, as he passed beneath them, on
the top of the head with their hats in the frenzy of their delight.
For two hours Ludsey went stark mad and Harry Rames had reached
exhaustion before a gigantic captain of the fire brigade lifted him
panting and dishevelled out of the throng, and drawing him into a
small committee-room locked the door against his votaries.

"Better wait for a little while here, sir," he said; and it was one
o'clock in the morning before he ventured to return to his hotel.

By that time the madness was already past. There was still noise in
the blazing rooms of the clubs. But the streets were empty and up the
climbing hill the city was quiet as a house of mutes. A placard in the
window of the newspaper office recorded the figures of the election,
and the boarding which protected the shops opposite to his hotel shone
white in the light of the lamps. But for those two signs, even Rames
might have found it difficult of belief that so lately this very
hill had rung with cheers and seethed with a tumultuous populace.
To-morrow, however, the sirens of the factories would shrill across
the house-tops at six and the work of a strenuous industrial town
begin. Ludsey had no time to dally with victories won and triumphs
which had passed.

Nor indeed had Harry Rames. He rang the bell at the door and entered
the hall quickly. There was something which he should have done before
now, though only now he remembered it. With a word to the porter, he
went into the office and switched on the electric light. He crossed to
the corner where the telephone was fixed and called up the White
House. A woman's voice, very small and clear, came back to him over
the lines. He recognized it with a thrill of satisfaction. It was
Cynthia Daventry's.

"Oh, it's you yourself," he cried eagerly, and he heard Cynthia, at
the other end of the telephone, laugh with pleasure at his eagerness.

"Yes," she answered. "I thought perhaps you might ring me up."

So she had waited--just that they might talk together for a few
moments. Harry Rames, however, did not answer her. It seemed to him
from the intonation of her voice that she had more to say if she would
only make up her mind to say it. He stood and waited with the receiver
at his ear, and after a little while Cynthia spoke again upon a lower
note.

"I am glad that you did. I should have been disappointed if you
hadn't."

"Thank you," said Rames.

He spoke very gently. There was no smile of triumph upon his face. It
had become of vast importance to him within the last two hours to know
how her thoughts dealt with him; and he was not sure. There was
friendship between them--yes. But how far on her side did it reach? He
had no answer to that question.

"You have heard the result?" he asked.

"Yes. Mr. Benoliel telephoned to me at once from the Mayor's parlor."

"I ought to have done that," said Harry Rames.

"Oh, no. You were making speeches," replied Cynthia with a laugh. She
was at all events not offended by his omission.

"And you are glad that I have won?" he asked. And again she waited a
while before she answered; and when she did speak it was with that
little spirit of resentment which Rames had heard before in her voice.

"Well,--since your heart was so much set on winning,--yes, there you
have your triumph--I am glad that you won."

Cynthia meant what she said, but she was reluctant to mean it. She
spoke, too, under a constraint to speak. She had a picture before her
eyes of the man at the other end of the line quietly waiting upon her,
certain perhaps of what she would say. And the picture and the sense
of compulsion were both an offence to her.

"Good-night," she added curtly and with a sharp, quick movement she
hung up the receiver. The little clang of metal travelled along the
line to Harry Rames and emphasized her resentment.

But he was not disturbed by that. On the whole he looked upon it as a
favorable sign. So definite a resentment implied that she was
interested and set a value on their friendship. Rames went upstairs to
bed, but he was too tired to sleep and his thoughts raced ahead and
scouted in the future. He had leaped the first obstacle in the race,
but that once leaped and looked back upon became a tiny thing compared
with those which lay ahead.

"Will she? Will she not?" he asked. All hung upon the answers to those
questions. He was poor. He must marry. He must marry money and even
money was not enough. Other qualities were needed to help him to the
great career. But they were all there, a few miles away, possessed by
the young mistress of the White House. She had looks and manners and a
distinction of her own. You could not be in a room with her, however
crowded, and be long unaware that she was present too. Only--would
she?

He had very little to offer her--beyond this earnest of future success
which he had won to-night. And six hundred and seventy others would
have won just the same opportunity before the year was a fortnight
older. Moreover, Cynthia was romantic and he was not. For all her
friendliness he was a bitter disappointment to her. He recognized it
all and began to regret that he had not donned the glittering cloak of
romance which so often she had held out to him. But his foresight came
to console him.

"I could never have lived up to it," he reflected. "She would have
found me out. I have been honest with her and she likes honesty."

Certainly there were points in his favor. Rames took heart. She had
run the gauntlet of the drawing-rooms through a London season. Men had
gone down before her satin slippers, men ancient and modern. Mothers
of daughters had frowned upon her, mothers of sons had smiled. Young
Lord Helmsdale, adored of the ladies, had pursued her, and it was his
habit to be pursued. Yet she had come out of the throng to
Warwickshire heart-free. Of that he was sure.

Besides, she had waited up to speak to him. That was something,--not
very much, perhaps,--but surely something. Also, since he had wished
to win, she was glad that he had won. Rames's memories took him back
to the night when they first met at the Admiralty. Not thus had she
spoken then. She had moved toward him since that night--reluctantly,
slowly. Yet she had moved.

He was still casting up this ledger of his chances when a lonely
booming sound broke upon the stillness of the night and penetrated
through the open window like some melancholy siren of the sea. It was
repeated and repeated, growing louder with each repetition yet hardly
more articulate, and without any change of intonation. And every now
and then it was interrupted for a few seconds by a dull crash. Rames
tried to thrust it from his notice.

"Will she? Will she not?" he asked himself. But the booming sound
would not be denied. It was as the wail of some utterly friendless man
who cared not whether his fellows slept or waked. It was thoroughly
pitiless. Nearer it came to the hotel, and now wavering, heavy feet
could be heard to beat an irregular accompaniment. The occasional thud
was explained. A very drunken man was staggering up the hill and from
time to time he fell upon the pavement, unconscious that he fell,
barely aware only that his long-drawn cry had ceased. Rames thought of
him as a malignant creature determined to inflict torture--until the
sound at last sifted itself into definite words. "Vote for Harry
Rames!" the nightfarer cried aloud to a city which had already done
so; and at times he dropped the Harry and inserted an epithet of color
common no doubt in his vocabulary. He passed beneath the windows and
with many a tumble faded into distance, invoking the unresponsive gas
lamps.

Rames turned over on his side with relief.

"My dear," he whispered, "take his advice and vote for Harry Rames! I
shall owe you much, but I'll make it up to you. I'll not ask you till
I am sure I can. I must risk Helmsdale carrying you off."

He fell asleep and even the tune the clock chimes in Ludsey church
played at four o'clock in the morning did not make him stir. But at
the White House just at that hour Cynthia waked. It was not the clock
which waked her. It seemed to her that she had heard a step in the
corridor. She sat up in her bed and in a few seconds was sure of it.
Some one was moving very stealthily about the house. For a moment her
old horror gripped her. Here was her father come at last with
authority to claim her. She sat staring wide-eyed into the darkness,
flung back to the days when she was a child. Then her reason
reasserted itself. Her father was dead. The blood flowed again to her
heart. But the stealthy sound continued. She heard a door gently
latched. She sprang out of bed, opened her own door, and switched on
the light. The corridor was empty to the edge of the shadows. She
peered into them. She saw nothing, and no sound reached her now.

"Who is it?" she asked in a loud voice, and no answer came to her. She
waited in her doorway with a hand to her breast. The plank of a stair
cracked loudly, close to her; but no footsteps made it crack. She went
back into her room.