[Illustration:  “ALICIA UPRIGHT IN HER CORNER—­OLIVER, DEEP IN HIS ARMCHAIR”]

Then—­in the very midst of it—­he remembered, with a pang, another skirmish, another battle of words—­with another adversary, in a different scene.  The thrill of that moment in the Tallyn drawing-room, when he had felt himself Diana’s conqueror; delighting in her rosy surrender, which was the mere sweet admission of a girl’s limitations; and in its implied appeal, timid and yet proud, to a victor who was also a friend—­all this he was conscious of, by association, while the sparring with Alicia still went on.  His tongue moved under the stimulus of hers; but in the background of the mind rose the images and sensations of the past.

Lady Lucy, meanwhile, looked on, well pleased.  She had not seen Oliver so cheerful, or so much inclined to talk, since “that unfortunate affair,” and she was proportionately grateful to Alicia.

Marsham returned to the drawing-room with the ladies, declaring that he must be off in twenty minutes.  Alicia settled herself in a corner of the sofa, and played with Lady Lucy’s dog.  Marsham endeavored, for a little, to do his duty by Miss Falloden; but in a few minutes he had drifted back to Alicia.  This time she made him talk of Parliament, and the two or three measures in which he was particularly interested.  She showed, indeed, a rather astonishing acquaintance with the details of those measures, and the thought crossed Marsham’s mind:  “Has she been getting them up?—­and why?” But the idea did not make the conversation she offered him any the less pleasant.  Quite the contrary.  The mixture of teasing and deference which she showed him, in the course of it, had been the secret of her old hold upon him.  She reasserted something of it now, and he was not unwilling.  During the morose and taciturn phase through which he had been passing there had been no opportunity or desire to talk of himself, especially to a woman.  But Alicia had always made him talk of himself, and he had forgotten how agreeable it might be.

He threw himself down beside her, and the time passed.  Lady Lucy and Miss Falloden had retired into the back drawing-room, where the one knitted and the other gossiped.  But as the clock struck a quarter to eleven Lady Lucy called, in some astonishment:  “So you are not going back to the House, Oliver?”

He sprang to his feet.

“Heavens!” He looked at the clock, irresolute.  “Well, there’s nothing much on, mother.  I don’t think I need.”

And he subsided again into his chair beside Alicia.

Miss Falloden looked at Lady Lucy with a meaning smile.

“I didn’t know they were such friends!” she said, under her breath.

Lady Lucy made no reply.  But her eyes travelled through the archway dividing the two rooms to the distant figures framed within it—­Alicia, upright in her corner, the red gold of her hair shining against the background of a white azalea; Oliver, deep in his arm-chair, his long legs crossed, his hands gesticulating.