d
have held that she was more reserved with the Dictator than with others
of her friends. Soame Rivers saw that there was a difference in her
bearing towards the Dictator and towards the courtiers of her little
court, and he smiled cynically and pretended to be amused.

Ericson's acquaintance with the Langleys ripened into that rapid
intimacy which is sometimes possible in London. At the end of a week he
had met them many times and had been twice to their house. Helena had
always insisted that a friendship which was worth anything should
declare itself at once, should blossom quickly into being, and not grow
by slow stages. She offered the Dictator her friendship very frankly and
very graciously, and Ericson accepted very frankly the gracious gift.
For it delighted him, tired as he was of all the strife and struggle of
the last few years, to find rest and sympathy in the friendship of so
charming a girl; the cordial sympathy she showed him came like a balm to
the humiliation of his overthrow. He liked Helena, he liked her father;
though he had known them but for a handful of days, it always delighted
him to meet them; he always felt in their society that he was in the
society of friends.

One evening, when Ericson had been little more than a month in London,
he found himself at an evening party given by Lady Seagraves. Lady
Seagraves was a wonderful woman--'the fine flower of our modern
civilisation,' Soame Rivers called her. Everybody came to her house; she
delighted in contrasts; life was to her one prolonged antithesis. Soame
Rivers said of her parties that they resembled certain early Italian
pictures, which gave you the mythological gods in one place, a battle in
another, a scene of pastoral peace in a third. It was an astonishing
amalgam.

Ericson arrived at Lady Seagraves' house rather late; the rooms were
very full--he found it difficult to get up the great staircase. There
had been some great Ministerial function, and the dresses of many of the
men in the crowd were as bright as the women's. Court suits, ribands,
and orders lent additional colour to a richly coloured scene. But even
in a crowd where everybody bore some claim to distinction the arrival of
the Dictator aroused general attention. Ericson was not yet sufficiently
hardened to the experience to be altogether indifferent to the fact that
everyone was looking at him; that people were whispering his name to
each other as he slowly made his way from s