her to think
of.

And now--never so much as an ordinary word of friendship between them
again? "On the broad seas of life enisled"--separate, estranged, for
ever? It was like the touch of death--the experience brought with it
such a chill--such a sense of irreparable fact, of limitations never to
be broken through.

Then she braced herself. The "things that are behind" must be left. To
have married him after all would have been the greatest wrong. Nor, in
one sense, was what she had done irreparable. She chose to believe Frank
Leven, rather than Edward Hallin. Of course he must and should marry! It
was absurd to suppose that he should not. No one had a stronger sense of
family than he. And as for the girl--the little dancing, flirting
girl!--why the thing happened every day. _His_ wife should not be too
strenuous, taken up with problems and questions of her own. She should
cheer, amuse, distract him. Marcella endeavoured to think of it all with
the dry common-sense her mother would have applied to it. One thing at
least was clear to her--the curious recognition that never before had
she considered Aldous Raeburn, _in and for himself_, as an independent
human being.

"He was just a piece of furniture in my play last year," she said to
herself with a pang of frank remorse. "He was well quit of me!"

But she was beginning to recover her spirits, and when at last Raeburn,
after a few words with a minister who had just arrived, disappeared
suddenly behind the Speaker's chair, the spectacle below her seized her
with the same fascination as before.

The House was filling rapidly. Questions were nearly over, and the
speech of the evening, on which considerable public expectation both
inside and outside Parliament had been for some time concentrated, was
fast approaching. Peers were straggling into the gallery; the reporters
were changing just below her: and some "crack hands" among them, who had
been lounging till now, were beginning to pay attention and put their
paper in order. The Irish benches, the Opposition, the Government--all
were full, and there was a large group of members round the door.

"There he is!" cried Marcella, involuntarily, with a pulse of
excitement, as Wharton's light young figure made its way through the
crowd. He sat down on a corner seat below the gangway and put on his
hat.

In five minutes more he was on his feet, speaking to an attentive and
crowded House in a voice--clear, a little hard,