ing and
consolidating the Coalition by the graceful hospitality which the
wealth of herself and her husband enabled her to dispense. She had
made herself a Prime Ministress by the manner in which she opened
her saloons, her banqueting halls, and her gardens. It had never
been done before, and now it had been well done. There had been no
failure. And yet everything was to be broken down because his nerves
had received a shock!

"Let it die out," Mrs. Finn had said. "The people will come here and
will go away, and then, when you are up in London, you will soon fall
into your old ways." But this did not suit the new ambition of the
Duchess. She had so fed her mind with daring hopes that she could not
bear that it should "die out." She had arranged a course of things in
her own mind by which she should come to be known as the great Prime
Minister's wife; and she had, perhaps unconsciously, applied the
epithet more to herself than to her husband. She, too, wished to be
written of in memoirs, and to make a niche for herself in history.
And now she was told that she was to let it "die out!"

"I suppose he is a little bilious," Barrington Erle had said. "Don't
you think he'll forget all about it when he gets up to London?" The
Duchess was sure that her husband would not forget anything. He never
did forget anything. "I want him to be told," said the Duchess, "that
everybody thinks that he is doing very well. I don't mean about
politics exactly, but as to keeping the party together. Don't you
think that we have succeeded?" Barrington Erle thought that upon the
whole they had succeeded; but suggested at the same time that there
were seeds of weakness. "Sir Orlando and Sir Timothy Beeswax are not
sound, you know," said Barrington Erle. "He can't make them sounder
by shutting himself up like a hermit," said the Duchess. Barrington
Erle, who had peculiar privileges of his own, promised that if he
could by any means make an occasion, he would let the Duke know that
their side of the Coalition was more than contented with the way in
which he did his work.

"You don't think we've made a mess of it?" she said to Phineas,
asking him a question. "I don't think that the Duke has made a mess
of it,--or you," said Phineas, who had come to love the Duchess
because his wife loved her. "But it won't go on for ever, Duchess."
"You know what I've done," said the Duchess, who took it for granted
that Mr. Finn knew all that his wife knew. "Has