“Listen,” she said, “if you had indeed pulled down those pillars, don’t you think that day by day and night by night you would have been haunted by the faces of those whom you had destroyed?  Think of the children who would have died of starvation, the women who would have been torn from their husbands, the ruined homes, the sorrow and the misery all through the land.  Yours would have been the hand which had dealt this blow.  You would not have lived to have seen into the future.  Would it have been enough for you to have believed that you had done it for the best—­that that unborn generation of which you spoke would have unfitted?  Oh, I do not think so!  I believe that when you realise it, you must be glad.”

“It is at any rate consoling to hear you say so,” he remarked.  “Yet, when you have made up your mind to play the martyr, it is a little hard,” he added, helping himself to strawberries, “to be treated like a pampered being.”

“In other words,” she laughed, “you are discontented because you have been successful?”

“I suppose human nature never meant to let us rest satisfied.”

“Don’t you ever think of yourself,” she asked, “what your own life is going to be?  You’ve settled down now.  You will be a Member of Parliament in a few weeks, a Cabinet Minister before long.  I know what my uncle thinks of you.  He believes in you.  To tell you the truth, so do I.”

“I am glad.”

“I believe,” she went on, “that you will do the work that you came here to do.  There is no reason why you should not do it from the Cabinet.  But there is the rest—­your own life.  Are you never going to amuse yourself, to take holiday, to draw some of the outside things into your scheme of being?”

He sat quite silent for a little time.  He was inclined to struggle against the charm of her soft voice, the easy intimacy with which she treated him.  In a sense he felt as though he were losing control of himself.

“I don’t know,” he said.  “I think one ought to find one’s work sufficient for a time.  It is engrossing, isn’t it?  And that reminds me—­I must go.”

He rose almost abruptly to his feet.  She was quick to appreciate his slight confusion of thought, his nervous self-impatience, and she smiled quietly.  She was content to let him escape.  She held out her hand, though, and his fingers seemed conscious of the firm, delicate warmth of her clasp.

“Come and talk to me again soon,” she begged.  “Come either as a politician or a friend, or however you like.  It gives me so much pleasure to talk with you.  Uncle will tell you that every one spoils me.  Even Sir William comes and tells me about his troubles with the Irish Members.  Will you come?”

He made a half promise.  His departure was a little hasty—­almost abrupt; he was conscious of a distinct turmoil of feeling.  He hurried away, as though anxious to rid himself of the influence of the place.  At the corner of the street he was about to hail a taxicab when a man gripped him by the arm.  He turned quickly around.  The face was somehow familiar to him—­the grey, untidy beard, long hairy eyebrows, sunken eyes, the shabby clothes.  It was David Ross.