“Never mind any more roses,” said Alicia.  “We ought to get home.”

They drove toward Tallyn in silence.  Alicia’s startling hat of white muslin framed the red gold of her hair, and the brilliant color—­assisted here and there by rouge—­of her cheeks and lips.  She said presently, in a sympathetic voice: 

“How sorry one is for her!”

Marsham made no reply.  They passed into the darkness of overarching trees, and there, veiled from him in the green twilight, Alicia no longer checked the dancing triumph in her eyes.

CHAPTER XVIII

One Saturday in early August, some weeks after the incident described in the last chapter, Bobbie Forbes, in the worst inn’s worst fly, such being the stress and famine of election time, drove up to the Tallyn front door.  It was the day after the polling, and Tallyn, with its open windows and empty rooms, had the look of a hive from which the bees have swarmed.  According to the butler, only Lady Niton was at home, and the household was eagerly awaiting news of the declaration of the poll at Dunscombe Town Hall.  Lady Niton, indeed, was knitting in the drawing-room.

“Capital!—­to find you alone,” said Bobbie, taking a seat beside her.  “All the others at Dunscombe, I hear.  And no news yet?”

Lady Niton, who had given him one inky finger—­(a pile of letters just completed lay beside her)—­shook her head, looking him critically up and down the while.

The critical eye, however, was more required in her own case.  She was untidily dressed, as usual, in a shabby black gown; her brown “front” was a little displaced, and her cap awry; and her fingers had apparently been badly worsted in a struggle with her pen.  Yet her diminutive figure in the drawing-room—­such is the power of personality—­made a social place of it at once.

“I obeyed your summons,” Bobbie continued, “though I’m sure Lady Lucy didn’t want to invite me with all this hubbub going on.  Well, what do you prophesy?  They told me at the station that the result would be out by two o’clock.  I very nearly went to the Town Hall, but the fact is everybody’s so nervous I funked it.  If Oliver’s kicked out, the fewer tears over spilled milk the better.”

“He won’t be kicked out.”

“Don’t make too sure!  I have been hearing the most dismal reports.  The Ferrierites hate him much worse than if he’d gone against them openly.  And the fellows he really agrees with don’t love him much better.”

“All the same he will get in; and if he don’t get office now he will in a few years.”

“Oliver must be flattered that you believe in him so.”

“I don’t believe in him at all,” said Lady Niton, sharply.  “Every country has the politicians it deserves.”

Bobbie grinned.

“I don’t find you a democrat yet.”

“I’m just as much of one as anybody in this house, for all their fine talk.  Only they pretend to like being governed by their plumbers and gas-fitters, and I don’t.”