And, strangely enough, for the moment it happened to touch her, to give her an increased interest in the affair, though afterwards she could reflect that in a man of Charles’ character, so soberly practical and mature, it was perhaps a trifle incongruous, and, at the best, not precisely the tone by which women are most likely to be won.

She said placidly: 

“I hope you will succeed.  If you take my advice, you will speak at once.”

“I had meant to take the first occasion,” he said.

“Ah, my dear,” she put in, “you had better make one yourself.”

Charles simply smiled.  Her approbation of his views, and the unwonted dissipation of a prolonged and indolent breakfast, together with the pleasant excitement of shortly taking the political field, had rendered him singularly mild.

He remembered that he was invited that night to a dance of some magnitude, at a house big enough for privacy to be easily secured, and where Mary would certainly be.

“Perhaps I will,” he said, gathering up his voluminous papers as he prepared for departure, “this evening.”

He was still in the same mood of cheerful resolution when, after an exceptionally busy day, which had also ministered in an exceptional degree to his self-esteem (it had included an interview with one of the whips of his party, as well as a satisfactory conversation with his agent on the temper of the constituency whose member was so seasonably deceased), he had dressed at his club, and dawdled at his accustomed table in the large bright room over a solitary dinner.

His head had been very full of his political ambitions, into which the image of Miss Masters had not inconveniently intruded.  He had eminently that orderly faculty of detachment which allows a man to separate and disconnect the various interests of his life, admitting each only in its due order and place; but none the less had he been conscious all along that somewhere in the background of his mind her image subsisted, and now that he was at leisure again to give her that place of honour in his consideration which she had long been insensibly acquiring, he was more than ever determined to do all that lay in his power to make her his wife.

It amazed him almost that he had not put the important question long before, so vital and inevitable had it become; and he scarcely considered, in his curious egoism, his scant acquaintance with the subtilty of a woman’s mind, how much Mary herself might have contributed to the delay by her careful avoidance of intimate topics, by the cloak of elaborate indifference in which she had wrapped herself whenever she had not been able to avoid being alone with him; so that, however much he had desired it, he could never, without doing her gross violence, have succeeded in striking the precisely right personal note.