However—­to repeat—­Lord Parham, as far as the fleshpots went, was finely treated.  Kitty was in full force, glittering in a spangled dress, her dazzling face and neck, and the piled masses of her hair, thrown out in relief against the panelled walls of the dining-room with a brilliance which might have tempted a modern Rembrandt to paint an English Saskia.  Eddie Helston, on her left, could not take his eyes from her.  And even Lord Parham, much as he disliked her, acknowledged, during the early courses, that she was handsome, and in her own way—­thank God! it was not the way of any womankind belonging to him—­good company.

He saw, too, or thought he saw, that she was anxious to make him amends for her behavior of the afternoon.  She restrained herself, and talked politics.  And within the lines he always observed when talking to women, lines dictated by a contempt innate and ineradicable, Lord Parham was quite ready to talk politics too.  Then—­it suddenly struck him that she was pumping him, and with great adroitness.  Ashe, he knew, wanted an early place in the session for a particular measure in which he was interested.  Lord Parham had no mind to give him the precedence that he wanted; was, in fact, determined on something quite different.  But he was well aware by now that Ashe was a person to be reckoned with; and he had so far taken refuge in vagueness—­an amiable vagueness, by which Ashe, on their walk before dinner, had been much taken in, misled no doubt by the strength of his own wishes.

And now here was Lady Kitty—­whom, by-the-way, it was not at all easy to take in—­trying to “manage” him, to pin him to details, to wheedle him out of a pledge!

Lord Parham, presently, looked at her with cold, smiling eyes.

“Ah! you are interested in these things, Lady Kitty?  Well—­tell me your views.  You women have such an instinct—­”

—­whereby the moth was kept hovering round the flame.  Till, in a flash, Kitty awoke to the fact that while she had been listening happily to her own voice, taking no notice whatever of the signals which William endeavored to send her from the other end of the table—­while she had been tripping gayly through one indiscretion after another, betraying innumerable things as to William’s opinions and William’s plans that she had infinitely better not have betrayed—­Lord Parham had said nothing, betrayed nothing, promised nothing.  A quiet smile—­a courteous nod—­and presently a shade of mockery in the lips—­the meaning of them, all in a moment, burst on Kitty.

Her face flamed.  Thenceforward it would be difficult to describe the dinner.  Conversationally, at Kitty’s end it became an uproar.  She started the wildest topics, and Lord Parham had afterwards a bruised recollection as of one who has been dragged or driven, Caliban-like, through brake and thicket, pinched and teased and pelted by elfish fingers, without one single uncivil speech or act of overt offence to which an angry guest could point.  With each later course, the Prime Minister grew stiffer and more silent.  Endurance was written in every line of his fighting head and round, ungraceful shoulders, in his veiled eyes and stolid mouth.  Lady Tranmore gave a gasp of relief when at last Kitty rose from her seat.