To Mannering there seemed something almost unreal about the chaste perfection of the meal and its wonderful service.  They dined at a small round table, so small that more than once their fingers touched upon the tablecloth.  A single servant waited upon them, swiftly and perfectly.  The butler appeared only with the wine, which he served, and quietly withdrew.  Across the tangled mass of flowers, only a few feet away all the time, sat the woman who had suddenly made the world so beautiful to him.  A murmur of conversation continually flowed between them, but he was never very sure what they were talking about.  He wanted to sit still, to feast his eyes, all his senses, upon her, to strive to realize this new thing, that from henceforth she was his!  And then suddenly she broke the spell.  She leaned back in her chair and laughed softly.

“I have just remembered,” she said, in response to his inquiring look, “why I came to call upon you this evening.  What a long time ago it seems.”

He smiled.

“And I never thought to ask you,” he remarked.

“We must have no secrets now,” she said, with a delightful smile.  “Leslie Borrowdean came to see me this afternoon, and he was very anxious about you.  He declared that you wanted to postpone your great meetings in the North until after you had made some independent investigations in some of the manufacturing centres.  Poor Sir Leslie!  You had frightened him so completely that he was scarcely coherent.”

Mannering smiled a little gravely.  It was like coming back to earth.

“Politics with Borrowdean are so much a matter of pounds, shillings and pence that the bare idea of his finding himself a day further away from office frightens him to death,” he said.  “We are all like the pawns, to be moved about the chessboard of his life.”

Berenice smiled.

“He is certainly a very self-centred person,” she remarked; “but do you know, I am really a little curious to know how you succeeded in frightening him so thoroughly.”

“I had a fright myself,” Mannering said.  “I was made to feel for an hour or so like a Rip van Winkle with the cobwebs hanging about me—­Rip van Winkle looking out upon a new world!”

“You a Rip van Winkle!” she laughed.  “What was it that man who wrote in the Nineteenth Century called you last week?  ’The most precise and far-seeing of our politicians.’”

“The men who write in reviews,” he murmured, “sometimes display the most appalling ignorance.  There was also some one in the Saturday Review who alluded to me last week as a library politician.  My friend quoted that against me.  ‘A man who essays to govern a people he knows nothing of.’  It was one of the labour party who wrote it, I know, but it sticks.”

“You are not losing confidence in yourself, surely?” she remarked, smiling.

“My views are unchanged, if that is what you mean,” he answered.  “I believe I know what is good for the people, and when I am sure of it I shall not be afraid to take up the gauntlet.  But I must be quite sure.”