, Lady Jane."

"Young men!" she scoffed. "But you are young."

"Am I?" he answered, a little sadly. "I am not feeling it just now.
Besides, there is something wrong about my enthusiasms. They are
becoming altogether too pastoral. I am rather thinking of taking up the
cultivation of roses and of making a terraced garden down to the sea.
Do you know anything about gardening, Lady Jane?"

"Of course I do," she answered, a little impatiently. "A very excellent
hobby it is for women and dreamers and elderly men. There is plenty of
time for you to take up such a pursuit when you have finished your
work."

"Fifteen thousand intelligent voters have just done their best to tell
me that it is already finished," he sighed.

She made a little grimace.

"Am I going to be disappointed in you, I wonder?" she asked. "I don't
think so. You surely wouldn't let a little affair like one election
drive you out of public life? It was so obvious that you were made the
victim for Horlock's growing unpopularity in the country. Haven't you
realised that yourself--or perhaps you don't care to talk about these
things to an ignoramus such as I am?"

"Please don't believe that," he begged hastily. "I think yours is
really the common-sense view of the matter. Only," he went on, "I have
always represented, amongst the coalitionists, the moderate Socialist,
the views of those men who recognise the power and force of the coming
democracy, and desire to have legislation attuned to it. Yet it was the
Democratic vote which upset me at Hellesfield."

"That was entirely a matter of faction," she persisted. "That horrible
person Miller was sent down there, for some reason or other, to make
trouble. I believe if the election had been delayed another week, and
you had been able to make two more speeches like you did at the Corn
Exchange, you would have got in."

He looked at her in some surprise.

"That is exactly what I thought myself," he agreed. "How on earth do
you come to know all these things?"

"I take an interest in your career," she said, smiling at him, "and I
hate to see you so dejected without cause."

He felt a little thrill at her words. A queer new sense of
companionship stirred in his pulses. The bitterness of his suppressed
disappointment was suddenly soothed. There was something of the
excitement of the discoverer, too, in these new sensations. It seemed
to him that he was finding something which had been choked out of his
life