“I want to thank you with all my heart,” she stammered.  And then by an awkward intuition she looked in his face and saw written there all the hopelessness and longing which he was striving to conceal.  For one moment she saw clearly, and then the crooked perplexities of the world seemed to stare cruelly in her eyes.  A sob caught her voice, and before she was conscious of her action she laid a hand on Lewis’s arm and burst into tears.

The sight was so unexpected that it deprived him of all power of action.  Then came the fatally easy solution that it was but reaction of over-strained nerves.  Always ill at ease in a woman’s presence, a woman’s tears reduced him to despair.  He stroked her hair gently as he would have quieted a favourite horse.

“I am so sorry that these brutes have frightened you.  But here we are at Glenavelin gates.”

And all the while his heart was crying out to him to clasp her in his arms, and the words which trembled on his tongue were the passionate consolations of a lover.

CHAPTER XVI

A MOVEMENT OP THE POWERS

At Mrs. Montrayner’s dinner parties a world of silent men is sandwiched between a monde of chattering women.  The hostess has a taste for busy celebrities who eat their dinner without thought of the cookery, and regard their fair neighbours much as the diners think of the band in a restaurant.  She chose her company with care, and if at her table there was not the busy clack of a fluent conversation, there was always the possibility of bons mots and the off-chance of a State secret.  So to have dined with the Montrayners became a boast in a small social set, and to the unilluminate the Montrayner banquets seemed scarce less momentous than Cabinet meetings.

Wratislaw found himself staring dully at a snowy bank of flowers and looking listlessly at the faces beyond.  He was extremely worried, and his grey face and sunken eyes showed the labour he had been passing through.  The country was approaching the throes of a crisis, and as yet the future was a blind alley to him.  There was an autumn session, and he had been badgered all the afternoon in the Commons; his even temper had been perilously near its limits, and he had been betrayed unconsciously into certain ineptitudes which he knew would grin in his face on the morrow from a dozen leading articles.  The Continent seemed on the edge of an outbreak; in the East especially, Russia by a score of petty acts had seemed to foreshadow an incomprehensible policy.  It was a powder-barrel waiting for the spark; and he felt dismally that the spark might come at any moment from some unlooked-for quarter of the globe.  He ran over in his mind the position of foreign affairs.  All seemed vaguely safe; and yet he was conscious that all was vaguely unsettled.  The world was on the eve of one of its cyclic changes, and unrest seemed to make the air murky.