MORLEY.  Even so, they count; we have to reckon with them.  No, he is no failure; though it may seem like it just now.  Don’t pay too much attention to what the papers will say.  He doesn’t, though he reads them.  Look at him now!—­does that look like failure?

(He points to the exuberantly energetic figure intensely absorbed in its game.)

MRS. G. He is putting it on to-night a little, for me, Mr. Morley.  He knows I am watching him.  Tell me how he seemed when he first spoke to you.  Was he feeling it—­much?

MORLEY.  Oh, deeply, of course!  He believes that on a direct appeal we could win the election.

MRS. G. And you?

MORLEY.  I don’t.  But all the same I hold it the right thing to do.  Great causes must face and number their defeats.  That is how they come to victory.

MRS. G. And now that will be in other hands, not his.  Suppose he should not live to see it.  Oh, Mr. Morley, Mr. Morley, how am I going to bear it!

MORLEY.  Dear lady, I don’t usually praise the great altitudes.  May I speak in his praise, just for once, to-night?  As a rather faithless man myself—­ not believing or expecting too much of human nature—­I see him now, looking back, more than anything else as a man of faith.

MRS. G. Ah, yes.  To him religion has always meant everything.

MORLEY.  Faith in himself, I meant.

MRS. G. Of course; he had to have that, too.

MORLEY.  And I believe in him still, more now than ever.  They can remove him; they cannot remove Ireland.  He may have made mistakes and misjudged characters; he may not have solved the immediate problem either wisely or well.  But this he has done, to our honour and to his own:  he has given us the cause of liberty as a sacred trust.  If we break faith with that, we ourselves shall be broken—­and we shall deserve it.

MRS. G. You think that—­possible?

MORLEY.  I would rather not think anything just now.  The game is over; I must be going.  Good night, dear friend; and if you sleep only as well as you deserve, I could wish you no better repose.  Good-bye.

(He moves toward the table from which the players are now rising.)

GLADSTONE.  That is a game, my dear Armitstead, which came to this country nearly eight hundred years ago from the Crusades.  Previously it had been in vogue among the nomadic tribes of the Arabian desert for more than a thousand years.  Its very name, “backgammon,” so English in sound, is but a corruption from the two Arabic words bacca, and gamma (my pronunciation of which stands subject to correction), meaning—­if I remember rightly—­“the board game.”  There, away East, lies its origin; its first recorded appearance in Europe was at the Sicilian Court of the Emperor Frederick II; and when the excommunication of Rome fell on him in the year 1283, the game was placed under an interdict, which, during the next