“Then for heaven’s sake don’t let’s wish it!” she said decidedly.  “Oh, that’s the Irish Secretary answering now, is it?”—­a pause—­“Dear me, how civil everybody is.  I don’t think this is a good place for a Democrat, Mr. Wharton—­I find myself terribly in love with the Government.  But who’s that?”

She craned her neck.  Wharton was silent.  The next instant she drew hurriedly back.

“I didn’t see,” she murmured; “it’s so confusing.”

A tall man had risen from the end of the Government bench, and was giving an answer connected with the Home Secretary’s department.  For the first time since their parting in the Mellor drawing-room Marcella saw Aldous Raeburn.

She fell very silent, and leant back in her chair.  Yet Wharton’s quick glance perceived that she both looked and listened intently, so long as the somewhat high-pitched voice was speaking.

“He does those things very well,” he said carelessly, judging it best to take the bull by the horns.  “Never a word too much—­they don’t get any change out of him.  Do you see that old fellow in the white beard under the gallery?  He is one of the chartered bores.  When he gets up to-night the House will dine.  I shall come up and look for you, and hand you over to a friend if I may—­a Staffordshire member, who has his wife here—­Mrs. Lane.  I have engaged a table, and I can start with you.  Unfortunately I mustn’t be long out of the House, as it’s my motion; but they will look after you.”

The girls glanced a little shyly at each other.  Nothing had been said about dining; but Wharton took it for granted; and they yielded.  It was Marcella’s “day off,” and she was a free woman.

“Good-bye, then,” he said, getting up.  “I shall be on in about twenty minutes.  Wish me well through!”

Marcella looked round and smiled.  But her vivacity had been quenched for the moment; and Wharton departed not quite so well heartened for the fray as he could have wished to be.  It was hard luck that the Raeburn ghost should walk this particular evening.

Marcella bent forward again when he had gone, and remained for long silent, looking down into the rapidly filling House.  Aldous Raeburn was lying back on the Treasury bench, his face upturned.  She knew very well that it was impossible he should see her; yet every now and then she shrank a little away as though he must.  The face looked to her older and singularly blanched; but she supposed that must be the effect of the light; for she noticed the same pallor in many others.

“All that my life can do to pour good measure—­down—­running over—­into yours, I vowed you then!”

The words stole into her memory, throbbing there like points of pain.  Was it indeed this man under her eyes—­so listless, so unconscious—­who had said them to her with a passion of devotion it shamed her to think of.

And now—­never so much as an ordinary word of friendship between them again?  “On the broad seas of life enisled”—­separate, estranged, for ever?  It was like the touch of death—­the experience brought with it such a chill—­such a sense of irreparable fact, of limitations never to be broken through.