She left the house, pale, dignified, the tears in her eyes.  Kitty ran up-stairs, humming an air from “Faust,” as though she would tear it to pieces, put on a flame-colored hat that gave a still further note of extravagance to her costume, ordered a hansom, and drove away.

* * * * *

Whether Kitty got much joy out of the three weeks which followed must remain uncertain.  She had certainly routed Mary Lyster, if there were any final satisfaction in that.  Mary had left town early, and was now in Somersetshire helping her father to entertain, in order, said the malicious, to put the best face possible on a defeat which this time had been serious.  And instead of devoting himself to the wooing of a northern constituency where he had been adopted as the candidate of a new Tory group, Cliffe lingered obstinately in town, endangering his chances and angering his supporters.  Kitty’s influence over his actions was, indeed, patent and undenied, whatever might be the general opinion as to her effect upon his heart.  Some of Kitty’s intimates at any rate were convinced that his absorption in the matter was by now, to say the least, no less eager and persistent than hers.  At this point it was by no means still a relation of flattery on Kitty’s side and a pleased self-love on his.  It had become a duel of two personalities, or rather two imaginations.  In fact, as Kitty, learning the ways of his character, became more proudly mistress of herself and him, his interest in her visibly increased.  It might almost be said that she was beginning to hold back, and he for the first time pursued.

Once or twice he had the grace to ask himself where it was all to end.  Was he in love with her?  An absurd question!  He had paid his heavy tribute to passion if any man ever had, and had already hung up his votive tablet and his garments wet from shipwreck in the temple of the god.  But it seemed that, after all said and done, the society of a woman, young, beautiful, and capricious, was still the best thing which the day—­the London day, at all events—­had to bring.  At Kitty’s suggestion he was collecting and revising a new volume of his poems.  He and she quarrelled over them perpetually.  Sometimes there was not a line which pleased her; and then, again, she would delight him with the homage of sudden tears in her brown eyes, and a praise so ardent and so refined that it almost compared—­as Kitty meant it should—­with that of the dead.  In the shaded drawing-room, where every detail pleased his taste, Cliffe’s harsh voice thundered or murmured verse which was beyond dispute the verse of a poet, and thereby sensuous and passionate.  Ostensibly the verse concerned another woman; in truth, the slight and lovely figure sitting on the farther side of the flowered hearth, the delicate head bent, the finger-tips lightly joined, entered day by day more directly into the consciousness of the poet.  What harm?  All he asked was intelligence and response.  As to her heart, he made no claim upon it whatever.  Ashe, by-the-way, was clearly not jealous—­a sensible attitude, considering Lady Kitty’s strength of will.