of the inventions
going about?"

"There are so many," said Lady Tranmore.

At that moment, however, to her infinite relief, her companion abruptly
deserted her. She was free to observe the two distant figures in
conversation--Geoffrey Cliffe and Mr. Loraine, the latter a man now
verging on old age, white-haired and wrinkled, but breathing still
through every feature and every movement the scarcely diminished energy
of his magnificent prime. He stood with bent head, listening
attentively, but, as Lady Tranmore thought, coldly, to the arguments
that Cliffe was pouring out upon him. Once he looked up in a sudden
recoil, and there was a flash from an eye famous for its power of
majestic or passionate rebuke. Cliffe, however, took no notice, and
talked on, Loraine still listening.

"Look at them!" said Lady Parham, venomously, in the ear of one of her
intimates. "We shall have all this out in the House to-morrow. The
Opposition mean to play that man for all he's worth. Mr. Loraine,
too--with his puritanical ways! I know what he thinks of Cliffe. He
wouldn't <i>touch</i> him in private. But in public--you'll see--he'll
swallow him whole--just to annoy Parham. There's your politician."

And stiff with the angry virtue of the "ins," denouncing the faction of
the "outs," Lady Parham passed on.

Elizabeth Tranmore meanwhile turned to look for Mary Lyster. She found
her close behind, engaged in a perfunctory conversation, which evidently
left her quite free to follow things more exciting. She, too, was
watching; and presently it seemed to Lady Tranmore that her eyes met
with those of Cliffe. Cliffe paused; abruptly lost the thread of his
conversation with Mr. Loraine, and began to make his way through the
crowded room. Lady Tranmore watched his progress with some attention. It
was the progress, clearly, of a man much in the eye and mouth of the
public. Whether the atmosphere surrounding him in these rooms was more
hostile or more favorable, Lady Tranmore could not be quite sure.
Certainly the women smiled upon him; and his strange face, thinner,
browner, more weather-beaten and life-beaten than ever, under its crest
of grizzling hair, had the old arrogant and picturesque power, but, as
it seemed to her, with something added--something subtler, was it, more
romantic than of yore? which arrested the spectator. Had he really been
in love with that French woman? Lady Tranmore had heard it rumored that
she was dead.

It was not