he spirit of the flowers herself," Selingman
declared, "the wonderful Power on the other side of the sun, who draws
them out of the ground and touches their petals with colour, shakes
perfume into their blossoms and makes this England of yours, in
springtime, like a beautiful, sweet-smelling carpet."

"Don't listen to him, Julia," Maraton warned her. "It was only a month
ago that he told me that no civilised man should live in this country
because of the women and the beer."

"A man changes," Selingman insisted fiercely. "Your beer I will never
drink, but Miss Julia knows that she hasn't in the world a slave so
abject as I."

Maraton rose to his feet.

"I must go," he announced. "I have to talk with Mr. Foley for a few
minutes. You had better come with me, Aaron. Selingman will see Julia
back."

They watched him depart. Julia sighed as he passed through the door.

"I can read your thoughts," Selingman said quickly. "You are feeling,
are you not, that to-night his leaving us has in it something
allegorical. He was made for the storms of life, to fight in them and
rejoice in them, and Fate has taken him by the hand and is leading him
now towards the quieter places."

"It is not his choice," Julia murmured. "It is destiny."

"Can't you look a little way into the future?" Selingman continued,
peering through half-closed eyes into his wine glass. "He represents
the only possible link between the only possible political party of this
country and the people. He will win for them in twelve months what they
might have waited for through many weary years. He will sit in the high
places. History will speak well of him. I will wager you half a dozen
pairs of gloves that within a week the _Daily Oracle_ will call him the
modern Rienzi. And yet, with the end of the struggle, with the end of
the fierce fighting, comes something--what is it?--disappointment? We
have no right to be disappointed, and yet, somehow, one feels that it is
the cold and the storm and the wind which keep the best in us--the
fighting best--alive."

Julia's eyes were soft, for a moment, with tears. She, too, was
following him a little way into the future.

"They will make a politician of him," she sighed. "So much the better
for politics. But there is one thing which I do not think that he will
ever forget. So long as he lives he will be a people's man."

Selingman became curiously silent. Soon he paid the bill.

"Will you put me in a cab?" she ask