“Ashe trifles it as usual,” said Cliffe, as he and Mary forced a passage into one of the smaller rooms.  “Is there anything in the world that he really cares about?”

Mary looked at him with a start.  It was almost on her lips to say, “Yes! his wife.”  She only just succeeded in driving the words back.

“His not caring is a pretence,” she said.  “At least, Lady Tranmore thinks so.  She believes that he is becoming absorbed in politics—­much more ambitious than she ever thought he would be.”

“That’s the way of mothers,” said Cliffe, with a sarcastic lip.  “They have got to make the best of their sons.  Tell me what you are going to do this summer.”

He had thrown one arm round the back of a chair, and sat looking down upon her, his colorless fair hair falling thick upon his brow, and giving by contrast a strange inhuman force to the dark and singular eyes beneath.  He had a way of commanding a woman’s attention by flashes of brusquerie, melting when he chose into a homage that had in it the note of an older world, a world that had still leisure for, passion and its refinements, a world still within sight of that other which had produced the Carte du tendre.  Perhaps it was this, combined with the virilities, not to be questioned, of his aspect, the signs of hard physical endurance in the face burned by desert suns, and the suggestions of a frame too lean and gaunt for drawing-rooms, that gave him his spell and preserved it.

Mary’s conversation with him consisted at first of much cool fencing on her part, which gradually slipped back, as he intended it should, into some of the tones of intimacy.  Each meanwhile was conscious of a secret range of thoughts—­hers concerned with the effort and struggle, the bitter disappointments and disillusions of the past six weeks; and his with the schemes he had cherished in the East and on the way home, of marrying Mary Lyster, or more correctly, Mary Lyster’s money, and so resigning himself to the inevitable boredoms of an English existence.  For her the mental horizon was full of Kitty—­Kitty insolent, Kitty triumphant.  For him, too, Kitty made the background of thought—­environed, however, with clouds of indecision and resistance that would have raised happiness in Mary could she have divined them.

For he was now not easy to capture.  There had been enough and more than enough of women in his life.  The game of politics must somehow replace them henceforth, if, indeed, anything were still worth while, except the long day in the saddle and the dawn of new mornings in untrodden lands.

Mingled, all these, with hot dislike of Ashe, with the fascination of Kitty, and a kind of venomous pleasure in the commotion produced by his pursuit of her; inter penetrated, moreover, through and through with the memory of his one true feeling, and of the woman who had died, alienated from and despising him.  He and Mary passed a profitless half-hour.  He would have liked to propitiate her, but he had no notion what he should do with the propitiation, if it were reached.  He wanted her money, but he was beginning to feel with restlessness that he could not pay the cost.  The poet in him was still strong, crossed though it were by the adventurer.