“Kitty, what are you about?” he said, in pretended amazement.  But in reality he was not astonished at all.  His life for months past had been pitched in a key of extravagance and tumult.  He had been practically certain that he should find Kitty in the hall.

With great tenderness he half led, half carried her up-stairs.  She clung to him as passionately as, before dinner, she had repulsed him.  When they reached their room, the tired man, dropping with sleep, after a Parliamentary wrestle in which every faculty had been taxed to the utmost, took his wife in his arms; and there Kitty sobbed and talked herself into a peace of complete exhaustion.  In this state she was one of the most exquisite of human beings, with words, tone, and gestures of a heavenly softness and languor.  The evil spirit went out of her, and she was all ethereal tenderness, sadness, and remorse.  For more than two years, scenes like this had, in Ashe’s case, melted into final delight and intoxication which more than effaced the memory of what had gone before.  Now for several months he had dreaded the issue of the crisis, no less than the crisis itself.  It left him unnerved as though some morbid sirocco had passed over him.

When Kitty at last had fallen asleep, Ashe stood for some time beside his dressing-room window, looking absently into the cloudy night, too tired even to undress.  A gusty northwest wind tore down the street and beat against the windows.  The unrest without increased the tension of his mind and body.  Like Lady Tranmore, he had, as it were, stepped back from his life, and was looking at it—­the last three years of it in particular—­as a whole.  What was the net result of those years?  Where was he?  Whither were he and Kitty going?  A strange pang shot through him.  The mere asking of the question had been as the lifting of the lamp of Psyche.

The scene that night in the House of Commons had been for him a scene of conflict; in the main, also, of victory.  His virile powers, capacities, and ambitions had been at their height.  He had felt the full spell of the English political life, with all its hard fighting joy, the exhilaration which flows from the vastness of the interests on which it turns, and the intricate appeal it makes, in the case of a man like himself, to a hundred inherited aptitudes, tastes, and traditions.

And here he stood in the darkness, wondering whether indeed the best of his life were not over—­the prey of forebodings as strong and vagrant as the gusts outside.

Birds of the night!  He forced himself to bed, and slept heavily.  When he woke up, the May sun was shining into his room.  Kitty, in the freshest of morning dresses, was sitting on his bed like a perching bird, waiting impatiently till his eyes should open and she could ask him his opinion on her dress for the ball.  The savor and joy of life returned upon him in a flood.  Kitty was the prettiest thing ever seen; he had scored off those Tory fellows the night before; the Parhams’ dinner was all right; and life was once more kind, manageable, and full of the most agreeable possibilities.  A certain indolent impatience in him recoiled from the mere recollection of the night before.  The worry was over; why think of it again?