Then she braced herself.  The “things that are behind” must be left.  To have married him after all would have been the greatest wrong.  Nor, in one sense, was what she had done irreparable.  She chose to believe Frank Leven, rather than Edward Hallin.  Of course he must and should marry!  It was absurd to suppose that he should not.  No one had a stronger sense of family than he.  And as for the girl—­the little dancing, flirting girl!—­why the thing happened every day. His wife should not be too strenuous, taken up with problems and questions of her own.  She should cheer, amuse, distract him.  Marcella endeavoured to think of it all with the dry common-sense her mother would have applied to it.  One thing at least was clear to her—­the curious recognition that never before had she considered Aldous Raeburn, in and for himself, as an independent human being.

“He was just a piece of furniture in my play last year,” she said to herself with a pang of frank remorse.  “He was well quit of me!”

But she was beginning to recover her spirits, and when at last Raeburn, after a few words with a minister who had just arrived, disappeared suddenly behind the Speaker’s chair, the spectacle below her seized her with the same fascination as before.

The House was filling rapidly.  Questions were nearly over, and the speech of the evening, on which considerable public expectation both inside and outside Parliament had been for some time concentrated, was fast approaching.  Peers were straggling into the gallery; the reporters were changing just below her:  and some “crack hands” among them, who had been lounging till now, were beginning to pay attention and put their paper in order.  The Irish benches, the Opposition, the Government—­all were full, and there was a large group of members round the door.

“There he is!” cried Marcella, involuntarily, with a pulse of excitement, as Wharton’s light young figure made its way through the crowd.  He sat down on a corner seat below the gangway and put on his hat.

In five minutes more he was on his feet, speaking to an attentive and crowded House in a voice—­clear, a little hard, but capable of the most accomplished and subtle variety—­which for the first moment sent a shudder of memory through Marcella.

Then she found herself listening with as much trepidation and anxiety as though some personal interest and reputation depended for her, too, on the success of the speech.  Her mind was first invaded by a strong, an irritable sense of the difficulty of the audience.  How was it possible for any one, unless he had been trained to it for years, to make any effect upon such a crowd!—­so irresponsive, individualist, unfused—­so lacking, as it seemed to the raw spectator, in the qualities and excitements that properly belong to multitude!  Half the men down below, under their hats, seemed to her asleep; the rest indifferent.  And were those languid, indistinguishable murmurs what the newspapers call “cheers”?