“Look at them!” said Lady Parham, venomously, in the ear of one of her intimates.  “We shall have all this out in the House to-morrow.  The Opposition mean to play that man for all he’s worth.  Mr. Loraine, too—­with his puritanical ways!  I know what he thinks of Cliffe.  He wouldn’t touch him in private.  But in public—­you’ll see—­he’ll swallow him whole—­just to annoy Parham.  There’s your politician.”

And stiff with the angry virtue of the “ins,” denouncing the faction of the “outs,” Lady Parham passed on.

Elizabeth Tranmore meanwhile turned to look for Mary Lyster.  She found her close behind, engaged in a perfunctory conversation, which evidently left her quite free to follow things more exciting.  She, too, was watching; and presently it seemed to Lady Tranmore that her eyes met with those of Cliffe.  Cliffe paused; abruptly lost the thread of his conversation with Mr. Loraine, and began to make his way through the crowded room.  Lady Tranmore watched his progress with some attention.  It was the progress, clearly, of a man much in the eye and mouth of the public.  Whether the atmosphere surrounding him in these rooms was more hostile or more favorable, Lady Tranmore could not be quite sure.  Certainly the women smiled upon him; and his strange face, thinner, browner, more weather-beaten and life-beaten than ever, under its crest of grizzling hair, had the old arrogant and picturesque power, but, as it seemed to her, with something added—­something subtler, was it, more romantic than of yore? which arrested the spectator.  Had he really been in love with that French woman?  Lady Tranmore had heard it rumored that she was dead.

It was not towards Mary Lyster, primarily, that he was moving, Elizabeth soon discovered; it was towards herself.  She braced herself for the encounter.

The greeting was soon over.  After she herself had said the appropriate things, Lady Tranmore had time to notice that Mary Lyster, whose turn came next, did not attempt to say them.  She looked, indeed, unusually handsome and animated; Lady Tranmore was certain that Cliffe had noticed as much, at his first sight of her.  But the remarks she omitted showed how minute and recent was their knowledge of each other’s movements.  Cliffe himself gave a first impression of high spirits.  He declared that London was more agreeable than he had ever known it, and that after his three years’ absence nobody looked a day older.  Then he inquired after Ashe.

Lady Tranmore replied that William was well, but hard-worked; she hoped to persuade him to get a few days abroad at Whitsuntide.  Her manner was quiet, without a trace of either discourtesy or effusion.  Cliffe began to twist his mustache, a sign she knew well.  It meant that he was in truth both irritable and nervous.

“You think they’ll last till Whitsuntide?”

“The government?” she said, smiling.  “Certainly—­and beyond.”

“I give them three weeks,” said Cliffe, twisting anew, with a vigor that gave her a positive physical sympathy with the tortured mustache.  “There will be some papers out to-morrow that will be a bomb-shell.”