“But this is sheer madness,” I answered.

“Oh, no, it’s a bald statement of fact,” she went on.

“I don’t see how,” I said, involuntarily.

“Your article in the Hour will help.  Every trifle will help,” she said.  “Things that you understand and others that you cannot....  He is identifying himself with the Duc de Mersch.  That looks nothing, but it’s fatal.  There will be friendships ... and desertions.”

“Ah!” I said.  I had had an inkling of this, and it made me respect her insight into home politics.  She must have been alluding to Gurnard, whom everybody—­perhaps from fear—­pretended to trust.  She looked at me and smiled again.  It was still the same smile; she was not radiant to-day and pensive to-morrow.  “Do you know I don’t like to hear that?” I began.

“Oh, there’s irony in it, and pathos, and that sort of thing,” she said, with the remotest chill of mockery in her intonation.  “He goes into it clean-handed enough and he only half likes it.  But he sees that it’s his last chance.  It’s not that he’s worn out—­but he feels that his time has come—­unless he does something.  And so he’s going to do something.  You understand?”

“Not in the least,” I said, light-heartedly.

“Oh, it’s the System for the Regeneration of the Arctic Regions—­the Greenland affair of my friend de Mersch.  Churchill is going to make a grand coup with that—­to keep himself from slipping down hill, and, of course, it would add immensely to your national prestige.  And he only half sees what de Mersch is or isn’t.”

“This is all Greek to me,” I muttered rebelliously.

“Oh, I know, I know,” she said.  “But one has to do these things, and I want you to understand.  So Churchill doesn’t like the whole business.  But he’s under the shadow.  He’s been thinking a good deal lately that his day is over—­I’ll prove it to you in a minute—­and so—­oh, he’s going to make a desperate effort to get in touch with the spirit of the times that he doesn’t like and doesn’t understand.  So he lets you get his atmosphere.  That’s all.”

“Oh, that’s all,” I said, ironically.

“Of course he’d have liked to go on playing the stand-off to chaps like you and me,” she mimicked the tone and words of Fox himself.

“This is witchcraft,” I said.  “How in the world do you know what Fox said to me?”

“Oh, I know,” she said.  It seemed to me that she was playing me with all this nonsense—­as if she must have known that I had a tenderness for her and were fooling me to the top of her bent.  I tried to get my hook in.

“Now look here,” I said, “we must get things settled.  You ...”

She carried the speech off from under my nose.

“Oh, you won’t denounce me,” she said, “not any more than you did before; there are so many reasons.  There would be a scene, and you’re afraid of scenes—­and our aunt would back me up.  She’d have to.  My money has been reviving the glories of the Grangers.  You can see, they’ve been regilding the gate.”