“I suppose,” he admitted, “I should reconcile myself to the inevitable.  Times are going to be different.  I dare say that Aaron will be the only secretary I shall need.  But will she go?  Remember, she is a woman of the people.  I think that she will never settle down, even with your splendid work to control.  She is less a poet than a humanitarian.”

“What am I, man,” Selingman retorted, striking himself on the chest, “but a humanitarian?  Listen to the wonderful proof—­it is not a secretary I require; it is a wife!”

Maraton was staggered.

“Have you told her?”

“What is the use?” Selingman growled.  “She is yours, body and soul.  You have but to lift up your finger, and she would follow you to the end of the world.  I don’t idealize women, you know, Maraton, and virtue isn’t a fetish with me.  But I know that girl.  If you hold out your hands, she is yours, but if you withhold them, she is the most virginal creature that ever breathed.”

“She is a splendid character,” Maraton said softly.

“Why don’t you marry her yourself?” Selingman asked abruptly.  “How can you look at her, hear her speak, watch her, without wanting to marry her?  What are you made of?”

Maraton sighed.

“I am one of the victims, I suppose, of that curious instinct of selection.  I care for some one else; I have cared for some one else ever since the first night I set foot in England.”

“Then I’ll get her,” Selingman declared.  “In time I’ll get her.”

They all dined together at the little restaurant on the borders of Soho.  Selingman was the giver of the feast and his spirits were both wonderful and infectious.  The roar of London was recommencing.  Newspapers were being sold on the streets.  The strange cruisers seemed mysteriously to have disappeared from the Atlantic.  The fleet, imprisoned no longer, was on its way to the North Sea.  There was none of the foolish, over-exuberant rejoicing of bibulous jingoism, but a genuine, deep spirit of thankfulness abroad.  Men and women were glad but thoughtful.  There were new times to come, great promises had been made.  There were rumours everywhere of a new political Party.  “We pause to-night,” Selingman declared, “at the end of the first chapter.  Almost I am tempted to linger in this wonderful country—­at any rate until the headlines of the next are in type.  You go down to the House tonight?” “At nine o’clock,” Maraton replied, glancing at the clock.

“Will they remember,” Selingman continued thoughtfully, “that you were the Samson who pulled down the pillars, or will they merely hail you as the deliverer?  Will they think of that ghostly ride of yours on the locomotive, I wonder, when you tore screaming through the darkness, with the risk of a buffer on the line at every mile; stepped from the engine, grimy, with your breath sucked out of—­you by the wind, and the roar of the locomotive still throbbing in your ears—­stepped out to deliver your message to the waiting throngs?  Magnificent!  A subject worthy of me and my prose!  I shall write of it, Maraton.  I shall sing the glory of it in verse or script, when your fame as a politician of the moment has passed.  You will live because of the garland that I shall weave.”