father of her child. Unless she clung to her
effort, and to her paradoxical much-disappointed hope, her life and the
thought of what she had done with it would become unendurable. Dick and
his wife had not quite understood what had come over her.

If Mr. Foster was diplomatic, so was she; she set before her husband
neither Dick's complaints nor her own misgivings in their crudity; she
started by asking how his change of front would affect people and
instanced Dick and herself only as examples of how the thing might strike
certain minds. She must feed him with the milk of rectitude, for its
strong meat his stomach was hopelessly unready. But he was suspicious,
and insisted on hearing what Dick Benyon had said; so she told him pretty
accurately. His answer was a long disquisition on the political
situation, to which she listened with the same faint smile with which she
had heard Dick himself; at last he roundly stigmatised the Crusade as a
visionary and impracticable scheme.

"I stuck to it as long as I could," he said, "but you wouldn't have me
risk everything for it?"

"Or even anything?" she asked.

The question was a spark to him. Gladly leaving the immediate question,
he dilated on all that the coming contest meant to him, how victory would
assure his prospects, how defeat might leave him hopelessly out in the
cold, how it would be absurd to lose all that he was going to accomplish
for the sake of a hasty promise and a cause that he had come to
disbelieve in. "When did you come to disbelieve in it?" was the question
in her heart; he saw it in her eyes.

"It's a little hard to have to explain everything in private as well as
in public," he complained. "And my head's fit to split."

"Don't trouble any more about it; only I thought I'd better tell you what
Dick said." She came to him as he lay back in his chair and put her hand
on his brow. He was tired, not only looking tired; his head did ache, she
had no doubt; to turn these afflictions to account had always been his
way; so long ago as the Imperial League banquet she remembered it. "Go to
bed," she said. "I'll write a few letters first."

"I want you to understand me," he said. He loved her and she had made him
uneasy; her good opinion was very necessary to his happiness.

"I do understand you," she said, and persuaded him to go upstairs, while
she sat down by the fire, forgetful apparently of the excuse that she had
made for lingering.

Did she repent? T