As to his relation to Raeburn, he well remembered that when, after that long break in his life, he and Aldous had met casually again, in London or elsewhere, Aldous had shown a certain disposition to forget the old quarrel, and to behave with civility, though not with friendliness.  As to Wharton he was quite willing, though at the same time he had gone down to contest West Brookshire, and, above all, had found himself in the same house as Aldous Raeburn’s betrothed, with an even livelier sense than usual of the excitement to be got out of mere living.

No doubt when Raeburn heard that story of the library—­if he had heard it—­he recognised in it the man and the character he had known of old, and had shrunk from the connection of both with Marcella Boyce in bitter and insurmountable disgust.  A mere Hebraist’s mistake!

“That girl’s attraction for me was not an attraction of the senses—­except so far that for every normal man and woman charm is charm, and ginger is hot in the mouth and always will be!  What I played for with her was power—­power over a nature that piqued and yet by natural affinity belonged to me.  I could not have retained that power, as it happened, by any bait of passion.  Even without the Hurd affair, if I had gone on to approach her so, her whole moral nature would have risen against me and her own treachery.  I knew that perfectly well, and took the line I did because for the moment the game was too exciting, too interesting, to give up.  For the moment! then a few days,—­a few weeks later—­Good Lord! what stuff we mortals be!”

And he raised his shoulders, mocking, yet by no means disliking his own idiosyncrasies.  It had been strange, indeed, that complete change of mental emphasis, that alteration of spiritual axis that had befallen him within the first weeks of his parliamentary life, nay, even before the Hurd agitation was over.  That agitation had brought him vigorously and profitably into public notice at a convenient moment.  But what had originally sprung from the impulse to retain a hold over a woman, became in the end the instrument of a new and quite other situation.  Wharton had no sooner entered the House of Commons than he felt himself strangely at home there.  He had the instinct for debate, the instinct for management, together with a sensitive and contriving ambition.  He found himself possessed for the moment of powers of nervous endurance that astonished him—­a patience of boredom besides, a capacity for drudgery, and for making the best of dull men.  The omens were all favourable, sometimes startlingly so.  He was no longer hampered by the ill-will of a county or a family connection.  Here in this new world, every man counted strictly for what, in the parliamentary sense, he was worth.  Wharton saw that, owing to his public appearances during the two preceding years, he was noticed, listened to, talked about in the House, from the first; and that his position in the newly-formed though still loosely-bound Labour party was one of indefinite promise.  The anxieties and pitfalls of the position only made it the more absorbing.