brown.' Of course I remember! But your hair was down your back, you had
freckles, and you were as silent as a mouse."

"You see how much better my memory is than yours," she laughed.

"I am not so sure," he objected. "You took me for the gardener just
now."

"Not when you came down the steps," she protested, "and besides, it is
your own fault for wearing such atrociously old clothes."

"They shall be given away to-morrow," he promised.

"I should think so," she replied. "And you might part with the battered
straw hat you were wearing, at the same time."

"It shall be done," he promised meekly.

She became reminiscent.

"We were all so interested in you in those days. Lord Peters told us,
after you were gone, that some day you would be Prime Minister."

"I am afraid," he sighed, "that I have disappointed most of my friends."

"You have disappointed no one," she assured him firmly. "You will
disappoint no one. You are the one person in politics who has kept a
steadfast course, and if you have lost ground a little in the country,
and slipped out of people's political appreciation during the last
decade, don't we all know why? Every one of your friends--and your
wife, of course," she put in hastily, "must be proud that you have lost
ground. There isn't another man in the country who gave up a great
political career to learn his drill in a cadet corps, who actually
served in the trenches through the most terrible battles of the war, and
came out of it a Brigadier-General with all your distinctions."

He felt his heart suddenly swell. No one had ever spoken to him like
this. The newspapers had been complimentary for a day and had accepted
the verdict of circumstances the next. His wife had simply been the
reflex of other people's opinion and the trend of events.

"You make me feel," he told her earnestly, "almost for the first time,
that after all it was worth while."

The slight unsteadiness of his tone at first surprised, then brought her
almost to the point of confusion. Their eyes met--a startled glance on
her part, merely to assure herself that he was in earnest--and
afterwards there was a moment's embarrassment. She accepted a cigarette
and went back to her easy-chair.

"You did not answer the question I asked you a few minutes ago," she
reminded him. "When is your wife returning?"

The shadow was back on his face.

"Lady Jane," he said, "if it were not that we are old friends, dating
from that box o