“I was,” he admitted.

“But you are an Englishman, are you not?”

“I am English.  I daresay that under other considerations I might even have called myself a patriotic Englishman.  As it is, I have very little feeling of that sort.  There has been too much self-glorification, and it’s the wrong class of people who’ve revelled in it and enjoyed it.  It’s a fine thing to die for one’s country.  It’s a shameful thing that that country should grind the life and brains and blood out of a hundred of her children, day by day.”

A servant brought in tea, delightfully served.  There were small yellow china cups, pale tea with a faint, aromatic odour, thick cream, strawberries and cakes.

“If only you would appreciate it,” she declared, “you are really rather a privileged person.  No one has tea with me here.”

“I do appreciate it,” he assured her, “perhaps more than you think.”

There was a moment’s silence.  As he was taking his cup from her fingers, their eyes met, and she looked away again almost immediately.

“I wish,” she said, “that you would tell me more about yourself—­what you did in America, what your life has been?  You are rather a mysterious person, aren’t you?”

“In a sense, perhaps, I must seem so,” he admitted.  “You see, I was an orphan very early.  There wasn’t any one who cared how I grew up, and I wandered a good deal.  The earlier part of my life I was over here—­I was at Heidelberg University, bye the bye—­and in Paris for two years studying art, of all things!  Then something—­I don’t know what it was—­called me to America, and I found it hard to come back.  It’s a big country, you know, Lady Elisabeth.  It gets hold of you.  If it hadn’t driven me out, I doubt whether I should ever have left it.”

“But what was it first inspired you with this—­well, wouldn’t you call it a passion—­for championing the cause of the people?”

He shook his head.

“Born in me, I suppose.  I have watched them, lived with them, and then I have been through the whole gamut of Socialistic literature.  It is not worth reading, most of it.  The essential facts are there to look at, half-a-dozen phrases, a single field of view.  It’s all very simple.”

“Now I am going to ask you something else,” she went on.  “That first night when we talked together, you seemed so full of hope, so dauntless.  Since then, is it my fancy—­since you came back from Manchester—­are you a little disappointed ’with life?  Don’t you know in your heart that you’ve done what’s best?”

“I wish I did,” he answered simply.  “My common sense tells me that I have chosen well, and then sometimes, in the nights, or when I am alone, other thoughts come to me, and I feel almost as though I had been faithless, as though I had simply chosen the easier way.  Look how pleasant it is all being made for me!  I am no longer an outcast; I bask in the sun of your uncle’s patronage; people ask me to dinner, seek my friendship, people whom I feel ought to hate me.  I am not sure about it all.”