“Can’t we tempt you out, Miss Mallory?” said Ferrier.  “There is a marvellous change!” He pointed to the plain over which the night was falling.  “When we met you in the church it was still winter, or wintry spring.  Now—­in two hours—­the summer’s come!”

And on Diana’s face, as she stepped out to join him, struck a buffet of warm air; a heavy scent of narcissus rose from the flower-boxes on the terrace; and from a garden far below came the sharp thin prelude of a nightingale.

* * * * *

For about half an hour the young girl and the veteran of politics walked up and down—­sounding each other—­heart reaching out to heart—­dumbly—­behind the veil of words.  There was a secret link between them.  The politician was bruised and weary—­well aware that just as Fortune seemed to have brought one of her topmost prizes within his grasp, forces and events were gathering in silence to contest it with him.  Ferrier had been twenty-seven years in the House of Commons; his chief life was there, had always been there; outside that maimed and customary pleasure he found, besides, a woman now white-haired.  To rule—­to lead that House had been the ambition of his life.  He had earned it; had scorned delights for it; and his powers were at their ripest.

Yet the intrigue, as he knew, was already launched that might, at the last moment, sweep him from his goal.  Most of the men concerned in it he either held for honest fanatics or despised as flatterers of the mob—­ignobly pliant.  He could and would fight them all with good courage and fair hope of victory.

But Lucy Marsham’s son!—­that defection, realized or threatened, was beginning now to hit him hard.  Amid all their disagreements of the past year his pride had always refused to believe that Marsham could ultimately make common cause with the party dissenters.  Ferrier had hardly been able to bring himself, indeed, to take the disagreements seriously.  There was a secret impatience, perhaps even a secret arrogance, in his feeling.  A young man whom he had watched from his babyhood, had put into Parliament, and led and trained there!—­that he should take this hostile and harassing line, with threat of worse, was a matter too sore and intimate to be talked about.  He did not mean to talk about it.  To Lady Lucy he never spoke of Oliver’s opinions, except in a half-jesting way; to other people he did not speak of them at all.  Ferrier’s affections were deep and silent.  He had not found it possible to love the mother without loving the son—­had played, indeed, a father’s part to him since Henry Marsham’s death.  He knew the brilliant, flawed, unstable, attractive fellow through and through.  But his knowledge left him still vulnerable.  He thought little of Oliver’s political capacity; and, for all his affection, had no great admiration for his character.  Yet Oliver had power to cause him pain of a kind that no other of his Parliamentary associates possessed.