Luckily, no difficulty there!  The lad was almost as devoted to him—­Ashe—­as he was to Kitty.  He was absurd, affected, vain; but there was no vice in him, and a word of remonstrance would probably reduce him to abject regret and self-reproach.  Ashe intended that his mother should speak it, and as he made up his mind to ask her help, he felt for the second time the sharp humiliation of the husband who cannot secure his own domestic peace, but must depend on the aid of others.  Yet how could he himself go to young Helston?  Some men no doubt could have handled such an incident with dignity.  Ashe, with his critical sense for ever playing on himself and others; with the touch of moral shirking that belonged to his inmost nature; and, above all, with his half-humorous, half-bitter consciousness that whoever else might be a hero, he was none:  Ashe, at least, could and would do nothing of the sort.  That he should begin now to play the tyrannous or jealous husband would make him ridiculous both in his own eyes and other people’s.

And yet Kitty must somehow be protected from herself!...  Then—­as to politics?  Once, in talking with his mother, he had said to her that he was Kitty’s husband first, and a public man afterwards.  Was he prepared now to make the statement with the same simplicity, the same whole-heartedness?

Involuntarily he moved closer to the bed and looked down on Kitty.  Little, delicate face!—­always with something mournful and fretful in repose.

He loved her surely as much as ever—­ah! yes, he loved her.  His whole nature yearned over her, as the wife of his youth, the mother of his poor boy.  Yet, as he remembered the mood in which he had proposed to her, that defiance of the world and life which had possessed him when he had made her marry him, he felt himself—­almost with bitterness—­another and a meaner man.  No!—­he was not prepared to lose the world for her—­the world of high influence and ambition upon which he had now entered as a conqueror.  She must so control herself that she did not ruin all his hopes—­which, after all, were hers—­and the work he might do for his country.

What incredible perversity and caprice she had shown towards Lord Parham!  How was he to deal with it—­he, William Ashe, with his ironic temper and his easy standards?  What could he say to her but “Love me, Kitty!—­love yourself!—­and don’t be a little fool!  Life might be so amusing if you would only bridle your fancies and play the game!”

As for loftier things, “self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control”—­duty—­and the passion of high ideals—­who was he to prate about them?  The little Dean, perhaps!—­most spiritual of worldlings.  Ashe knew himself to be neither spiritual nor a hypocrite.  A certain measure, a certain order and harmony in life—­laughter and good-humor and affection—­and, for the fight that makes and welds a man, those great political and social interests in the midst of which he found himself—­he asked no more, and with these he would have been abundantly content.