He looked at his watch, lifting it close to his face to see the time.  His voice changed.  “Well—­if you provoke a man enough, you see he makes speeches.  Let it be a lesson to you, Amanda.  Here we are talking instead of going to our dinners.  The car has been waiting ten minutes.”

Amanda, so still, was the most disconcerting of all Amandas. . . .

A strange exaltation seized upon her very suddenly.  In an instant she had ceased to plot against him.  A vast wave of emotion swept her forward to a resolution that astonished her.

“Cheetah!” she said, and the very quality of her voice had changed, “give me one thing.  Stay until June with me.”

“Why?” he asked.

Her answer came in a voice so low that it was almost a whisper.

“Because—­now—­no, I don’t want to keep you any more—­I am not trying to hold you any more. . . .  I want. . . .”

She came forward to him and looked up closely at his face.

“Cheetah,” she whispered almost inaudibly, “Cheetah—­I didn’t understand.  But now—.  I want to bear your child.”

He was astonished.  “Old Leopard!” he said.

“No,” she answered, putting her hands upon his shoulders and drawing very close to him, “Queen—–­if I can be—­to your King.”

“You want to bear me a child!” he whispered, profoundly moved.

8

The Hindu agitators at the cavernous dinner under the House of Commons came to the conclusion that Benham was a dreamer.  And over against Amanda at her dinner-party sat Sir Sidney Umber, one of those men who know that their judgments are quoted.

“Who is the beautiful young woman who is seeing visions?” he asked of his neighbour in confidential undertones. . . .

He tittered.  “I think, you know, she ought to seem just slightly aware that the man to her left is talking to her. . . .”

9

A few days later Benham went down to Cambridge, where Prothero was now a fellow of Trinity and Brissenden Trust Lecturer. . . .

All through Benham’s writing there was manifest a persuasion that in some way Prothero was necessary to his mind.  It was as if he looked to Prothero to keep him real.  He suspected even while he obeyed that upward flourish which was his own essential characteristic.  He had a peculiar feeling that somehow that upward bias would betray him; that from exaltation he might presently float off, into the higher, the better, and so to complete unreality.  He fled from priggishness and the terror of such sublimity alike to Prothero.  Moreover, in relation to so many things Prothero in a peculiar distinctive manner saw.  He had less self-control than Benham, less integrity of purpose, less concentration, and things that were before his eyes were by the very virtue of these defects invariably visible to him.  Things were able to insist upon themselves with him.  Benham, on the other hand, when facts contradicted