his
own side, followed him to his fall. He returned to his seat after the
numbers had been read out, and sat there as composedly as if nothing had
happened, or as if the ringing cheers which greeted the Government
triumph were so many tributes to his own success. But those who knew, or
thought they knew, Rupert Langley well said that the hour in which he
sat there must have been an hour of terrible suffering. After that great
debate, the business of the rest of the evening fell rather flat, and
was conducted in a House which rapidly thinned down to little short of
emptiness. When it was at its emptiest, Rupert Langley rose, lifted his
hat to the Speaker, and left the Chamber.

It would not be strictly accurate to say that he never returned to it
that session; but practically the statement would be correct. He came
back occasionally during the short remainder of the session, and sat in
his new place below the gangway. Once or twice he put a question upon
the paper; once or twice he contributed a short speech to some debate.
He still spoke to his friends, with cold confidence, of his inevitable
return to influence, to power, to triumph; he did not say how this would
be brought about--he left it to be assumed.

Then paragraphs began to appear in the papers announcing Sir Rupert
Langley's intention of spending the recess in a prolonged tour in India.
Before the recess came Sir Rupert had started upon this tour, which was
extended far beyond a mere investigation of the Indian Empire. When the
House met again, in the February of the following year, Sir Rupert was
not among the returned members. Such few of his friends as were in
communication with him knew, and told their knowledge to others, that
Sir Rupert was engaged in a voyage round the world. Not a voyage round
the world in the hurried sense in which people occasionally made then,
and frequently make now--a voyage round the world, scampering, like the
hero of Jules Verne, across land and sea, fast as steam-engine can drag
and steamship carry them. Sir Rupert intended to go round the world in
the most leisurely fashion, stopping everywhere, seeing everything,
setting no limit to the time he might spend in any place that pleased
him, fixing beforehand no limit to chain him to any place that did not
please him. He proposed, his friends said, to go carefully over his old
ground in Central Asia, to make himself a complete master of the
problems of Australasian colonisation,