“Rubbish!  Your defeat at Hellesfield was a matter of political jobbery.  Any one could see through that.  Horlock ought never to have sent you there.  He ought to have found you a perfectly safe seat, and of course he will have to do it.”

He shook his head.

“I am not so sure.  Horlock resents my defeat almost as though it were a personal matter.  Besides, it is an age of young men, Lady Jane.”

“Young men!” she scoffed.  “But you are young.”

“Am I?” he answered, a little sadly.  “I am not feeling it just now.  Besides, there is something wrong about my enthusiasms.  They are becoming altogether too pastoral.  I am rather thinking of taking up the cultivation of roses and of making a terraced garden down to the sea.  Do you know anything about gardening, Lady Jane?”

“Of course I do,” she answered, a little impatiently.  “A very excellent hobby it is for women and dreamers and elderly men.  There is plenty of time for you to take up such a pursuit when you have finished your work.”

“Fifteen thousand intelligent voters have just done their best to tell me that it is already finished,” he sighed.

She made a little grimace.

“Am I going to be disappointed in you, I wonder?” she asked.  “I don’t think so.  You surely wouldn’t let a little affair like one election drive you out of public life?  It was so obvious that you were made the victim for Horlock’s growing unpopularity in the country.  Haven’t you realised that yourself—­or perhaps you don’t care to talk about these things to an ignoramus such as I am?”

“Please don’t believe that,” he begged hastily.  “I think yours is really the common-sense view of the matter.  Only,” he went on, “I have always represented, amongst the coalitionists, the moderate Socialist, the views of those men who recognise the power and force of the coming democracy, and desire to have legislation attuned to it.  Yet it was the Democratic vote which upset me at Hellesfield.”

“That was entirely a matter of faction,” she persisted.  “That horrible person Miller was sent down there, for some reason or other, to make trouble.  I believe if the election had been delayed another week, and you had been able to make two more speeches like you did at the Corn Exchange, you would have got in.”

He looked at her in some surprise.

“That is exactly what I thought myself,” he agreed.  “How on earth do you come to know all these things?”

“I take an interest in your career,” she said, smiling at him, “and I hate to see you so dejected without cause.”

He felt a little thrill at her words.  A queer new sense of companionship stirred in his pulses.  The bitterness of his suppressed disappointment was suddenly soothed.  There was something of the excitement of the discoverer, too, in these new sensations.  It seemed to him that he was finding something which had been choked out of his life and which was yet a real and natural part of it.