y made the world so beautiful to
him. A murmur of conversation continually flowed between them, but he was
never very sure what they were talking about. He wanted to sit still, to
feast his eyes, all his senses, upon her, to strive to realize this new
thing, that from henceforth she was his! And then suddenly she broke the
spell. She leaned back in her chair and laughed softly.

"I have just remembered," she said, in response to his inquiring look,
"why I came to call upon you this evening. What a long time ago it
seems."

He smiled.

"And I never thought to ask you," he remarked.

"We must have no secrets now," she said, with a delightful smile. "Leslie
Borrowdean came to see me this afternoon, and he was very anxious about
you. He declared that you wanted to postpone your great meetings in the
North until after you had made some independent investigations in some of
the manufacturing centres. Poor Sir Leslie! You had frightened him so
completely that he was scarcely coherent."

Mannering smiled a little gravely. It was like coming back to earth.

"Politics with Borrowdean are so much a matter of pounds, shillings and
pence that the bare idea of his finding himself a day further away from
office frightens him to death," he said. "We are all like the pawns, to
be moved about the chessboard of his life."

Berenice smiled.

"He is certainly a very self-centred person," she remarked; "but do
you know, I am really a little curious to know how you succeeded in
frightening him so thoroughly."

"I had a fright myself," Mannering said. "I was made to feel for an hour
or so like a Rip van Winkle with the cobwebs hanging about me--Rip van
Winkle looking out upon a new world!"

"You a Rip van Winkle!" she laughed. "What was it that man who wrote in
the _Nineteenth Century_ called you last week? 'The most precise and
far-seeing of our politicians.'"

"The men who write in reviews," he murmured, "sometimes display the most
appalling ignorance. There was also some one in the _Saturday Review_ who
alluded to me last week as a library politician. My friend quoted that
against me. 'A man who essays to govern a people he knows nothing of.' It
was one of the labour party who wrote it, I know, but it sticks."

"You are not losing confidence in yourself, surely?" she remarked,
smiling.

"My views are unchanged, if that is what you mean," he answered. "I
believe I know what is good for the people, and when I am sure of it I