“But I was the last person to know.  About a fortnight ago Mr. Wharton proposed to me.”

Hallin sprang from his chair, almost with a shout.  “And you refused him?”

She nodded, and then was angrily aware that, totally against her will or consent, and for the most foolish and remote reasons, those two eyes of hers had grown moist.

Hallin went straight over to her.

“Do you mind letting me shake hands with you?” he said, half ashamed of his outburst, a dancing light of pleasure transforming the thin face.  “There—­I am an idiot!  We won’t say a word more—­except about Lady Selina.  Have you seen her?”

“Three or four times.”

“What is she like?”

Marcella hesitated.

“Is she fat—­and forty?” said Hallin, fervently—­she beat him?”

“Not at all.  She is very thin—­thirty-five, elegant, terribly of her own opinion—­and makes a great parade of ‘papa.’”

She looked round at him, unsteadily, but gaily.

“Oh!  I see,” said Hallin, with disappointment, “she will only take care he doesn’t beat her—­which I gather from your manner doesn’t matter.  And her politics?”

“Lord Alresford was left out of the Ministry,” said Marcella slily.  “He and Lady Selina thought it a pity.”

“Alresford—­Alresford?  Why, of course!  He was Lord Privy Seal in their last Cabinet—­a narrow-minded old stick!—­did a heap of mischief in the Lords. Well!”—­Hallin pondered a moment—­“Wharton will go over!”

Marcella was silent.  The tremor of that wrestler’s hour had not yet passed away.  The girl could find no words in which to discuss Wharton himself, this last amazing act, or its future.

As for Hallin, he sat lost in pleasant dreams of a whitewashed Wharton, comfortably settled at last below the gangway on the Conservative side, using all the old catch-words in slightly different connections, and living gaily on his Lady Selina.  Fragments from the talk of Nehemiah—­Nehemiah the happy and truculent, that new “scourge of God” upon the parasites of Labour—­of poor Bennett, of Molloy, and of various others who had found time to drop in upon him since the Labour smash, kept whirling in his mind.  The same prediction he had just made to Marcella was to be discerned in several of them.  He vowed to himself that he would write to Raeburn that night, congratulate him and the party on the possibility of so eminent a recruit—­and hint another item of news by the way.  She had trusted her confidence to him without any pledge—­an act for which he paid her well thenceforward, in the coin of a friendship far more intimate, expansive, and delightful than anything his sincerity had as yet allowed him to show her.