Madeleine Alcot lay back and laughed.

“Kitty wishes to try her hand at managing him.”

Darrell joined her in mirth.  The notion of the white-haired, bullet-headed, shrewd, and masterful man who at that moment held the Premiership of England managed by Kitty, or any other daughter of Eve—­always excepting his wife—­must needs strike those who had the slightest acquaintance with Lord Parham as a delicious absurdity.

Suddenly Darrell checked himself, and bent forward.

“Where—­if I may ask—­is the poet?”

“Geoffrey?  Somewhere in the Balkans, isn’t he?—­making a revolution.”

Darrell nodded.

“I remember.  They say he is with the revolutionary committee at
Marinitza.  Meanwhile there is a new volume of poems out—­to-day,” said
Darrell, glancing at a newspaper thrown down beside him.

“I have seen it.  The ‘portrait’ at the end—­”

“Is Lady Kitty.”  They spoke under their breaths.

“Unmistakable, I think,” said Kitty’s best friend.  “As poetry, it seems to me the best thing in the book, but the audacity of it!” She raised her eyebrows in a half-unwilling, half-contemptuous admiration.

“Has she seen it?”

Mrs. Alcot replied that she had not noticed any copy in the house, and that Kitty had not spoken of it, which, given the Kitty-nature, she probably would have done, had it reached her.

Then they both fell into reverie, from which Darrell emerged with the remark: 

“I gather that last year some very important person interfered?”

This opened another line of gossip, in which, however, Mrs. Alcot showed herself equally well informed.  It was commonly reported, at any rate, that the old Duke of Morecambe, the head of Lady Eleanor Cliffe’s family, the great Tory evangelical of the north, who was a sort of patriarch in English political and aristocratic life, had been induced by some undefined pressure to speak very plainly to his kinsman on the subject of Lady Kitty Ashe.  Cliffe had expectations from the duke which were not to be trifled with.  He had, accordingly, swallowed the lecture, and, after the loss of his election, had again left England with an important newspaper commission to watch events in the Balkans.

“May he stay there!” said Darrell.  “Of course, the whole thing was absurdly exaggerated.”

“Was it?” said Mrs. Alcot, coolly.  “Kitty richly deserved most of what was said.”  Then—­on his start—­“Don’t misunderstand me, of course.  If twenty actions for divorce were given against Kitty, I should believe nothing—­nothing!” The words were as emphatic as voice and gesture could make them.  “But as for the tales that people who hate her tell of her, and will go on telling of her—­”

“They are merely the harvest of what she has sown?”

“Naturally.  Poor Kitty!”