Clara Mannering received him not altogether graciously.  As a matter of fact, she was looking for some one else.  They strolled along, talking almost in monosyllables.  Borrowdean found time to notice the change which even these few months in London had wrought in her.  She was still graceful in her movements, but a smart dressmaker had contrived to make her a perfect reproduction of the recognized type of the moment.  She had lost her delicate colouring.  There was a certain hardness in her young face, a certain pallor and listlessness in her movements which Borrowdean did not fail to note.  He tried to lead the conversation into more personal channels.

“We seem to have met very little during the last month,” he said.  “I have scarcely had an opportunity to ask you whether you find the life here as pleasant as you hoped, whether it has realized your expectations.”

“Does anything ever do that?” she asked, a little flippantly.  “It is different, of course.  I do not think that I should be willing to go back to Blakely, at any rate.”

“You have made a great many friends,” he remarked.  “I hear of you continually.”

“A host of acquaintances,” she remarked.  “I do not think that I have materially increased the circle of my friends.  I hear of you too, Sir Leslie, very often.  It seems that people give you a good deal of credit for inducing my uncle to come back into politics.”

“I certainly did my best to persuade him,” Sir Leslie answered, smoothly.  “If I had known how much anxiety he was going to cause us I might perhaps have been a little less keen.”

“Anxiety!” she repeated.

“Yes!  Do you know where he is now?”

“I have no idea,” Clara answered.  “All that I do know is that he has gone away for three weeks, and that I am going to stay with the Duchess till he comes back.  It is very nice of her, and all that, of course, but I feel rather as though I were going into prison.  The Duchess isn’t exactly the modern sort of chaperon.”

Borrowdean nodded sympathetically.

“And consider my anxiety,” he remarked.  “Your uncle has gone North to consider the true position of the labouring classes.  Now Mr. Mannering is a brilliant politician and a sound thinker, but he is also a man of sentiment.  They will drug him with it up there.  He will probably come back with half a dozen new schemes, and we don’t want them, you know.  He ought to be speaking at Glasgow and Leeds this week.  He simply ignores his responsibilities.  He yields to a sudden whim and leaves us plantes la.”

She seemed scarcely to have heard the conclusion of his sentence.  Her attention was fixed upon a group of men who were talking near.

“Do you know—­isn’t that Major Bristow?” she asked Borrowdean, abruptly.

Borrowdean put up his glass.

“Looks like him,” he admitted.

“I should be so much obliged,” she said, “if you would tell him that I wish to see him.  I have a message for his sister,” she concluded, a little lamely.