“Ashe is magnificent!  At last our side has found its leader.  Oh!  Parham will disappear with the next appeal to the country.  He is getting too infirm!  Above all, his eyes are nearly gone; his oculist, I hear, gives him no more than six months’ sight, unless he throws up.  Then Ashe will take his proper place, and if he doesn’t make his mark on English history, I’m a Dutchman.  Oh! of course that affair last year was an awful business—­the two affairs!  When Parliament opened in February there were some of us who thought that Ashe would never get through the session.  A man so changed, so struck down, I have seldom seen.  You remember what a handsome boy he was, up to last year even!  Now he’s a middle-aged man.  All the same, he held on, and the House gave him that quiet sympathy and support that it can give when it likes a fellow.  And gradually you could see the life come back into him—­and the ambition.  By George! he did well in that trade-union business before Easter; and the bill that’s on now—­it’s masterly, the way in which he’s piloting it through!  The House positively likes to be managed by him; it’s a sight worthy of our best political traditions.  Oh yes, Ashe will go far; and, thank God, that wretched little woman—­what has become of her, by-the-way?—­has neither crushed his energy nor robbed England of his services.  But it was touch and go.”

To all of which the Dean had replied little or nothing.  But his heart had sunk within him; and the doubtfulness of a certain enterprise in which he was engaged had appeared to him in even more startling colors than before.

However, here he was.  And suddenly, as he stood before the fire, he bowed his white head, and said to himself a couple of verses from one of the Psalms for the day: 

     “Who will lead me into the strong city:  who will bring me into Edom? 
     Oh, be thou our help in trouble:  for vain is the help of man.”

The door opened, and the Dean straightened himself impetuously, every nerve tightening to its work.

* * * * *

“How do you do, my dear Dean?” said Ashe, enclosing the frail, ascetic hand in both his own.  “I trust I have not kept you waiting.  My mother was with me.  Sit there, please; you will have the light behind you.”

“Thank you.  I prefer standing a little, if you don’t mind—­and I like the fire.”

Ashe threw himself into a chair and shaded his eyes with his hand.  The Dean noticed the strains of gray in his curly hair, and that aspect, as of something withered and wayworn, which had invaded the man’s whole personality, balanced, indeed, by an intellectual dignity and distinction which had never been so commanding.  It was as though the stern and constant wrestle of the mind had burned away all lesser things—­the old, easy grace, the old, careless pleasure in life.

“I think you know,” began the Dean, clearing his throat, “why I asked you to see me?”