l the session, and now you have finished up by three weeks of,
I should think, herculean labour. If you do not deserve rest who does?"

"The rest which I deserve," Mannering answered, bitterly, "is the rest of
those whose bones are bleaching amongst the caves and corals of the sea
there! That is Matapan Point, isn't it, where the hidden rocks are?"

She nodded.

"Really, you are developing into a very gloomy person," she said.
"Lawrence, don't let us fence with one another any longer. What you may
decide to do politically may be ruinous to your career, to your chance of
usefulness in the world, and to my hopes. But I want you to understand
this. It can make no difference to me. I have had dreams perhaps of a
great future, of being the wife of a Prime Minister who would lead his
country into a new era of prosperity, who would put the last rivets into
the bonds of a great imperial empire. But one never realizes all one's
hopes, Lawrence. I love politics. I love being behind the scenes, and
helping to move the pawns across the board. But I am a woman, too,
Lawrence, and I love you. Put everything connected with your public life
on one side. Let me ask you this. You are changed. Has anything come
between us as man and woman?"

"Yes," he answered, "something has come between us."

She sat quite still for several minutes. She prayed that he too might
keep silence, and he seemed to know her thoughts. Over the little sheet
of ornamental water, down the glade of beech and elm trees narrowing
towards the cliffs, her eyes travelled seawards. It was to her a terrible
moment. Mannering had represented so much to her, and her standard was a
high one. If there was a man living whom she would have reckoned above
the weaknesses of the herd, it was he. In those days at Blakely she had
almost idealized him. The simple purity of his life there, his delicate
and carefully chosen pleasures, combined with his almost passionate love
of the open places of the earth, had led her to regard him as something
different from any other man whom she had ever known. All Borrowdean's
hints and open statements had gone for very little. She had listened and
retained her trust. And now she had a horrible fear. Something had gone
out of the man, something which went for strength, something without
which he seemed to lack that splendid militant vitality which had always
seemed to her so admirable. Perhaps he was going to make a confession,
one of those cr