“Upon the face of it,” Tallente rejoined, with a smile, “your husband is proved guilty of an exaggeration.”

“Poor Henry!” his wife sighed.  “He does get a little hysterical about politics nowadays.  What he says is that you are in a fair way to form a coherent and united political party out of the various factions of Labour, a thing which a little time ago no one thought possible.”

Tallente promptly disclaimed the achievement.

“Stephen Dartrey is the man who did that,” he declared.  “I only joined the Democrats a few months ago.”

“But you are their leader,” Lady Alice put in.

“Only in the House of Commons,” Tallente replied.

“Dartrey is the leader of the party.”

“Somerham says that Dartrey is a dreamer,” the Countess went on, “that you are the man of affairs and the actual head of them all.”

“Your husband magnifies my position,” Tallente assured her.

Mrs. Ward Levitte, the wife of a millionaire and a woman of vogue, leaned forward and addressed him.

“Do set my mind at rest, Mr. Tallente,” she begged.  “Are you going to break up our homes and divide our estates amongst the poor?”

“Is there going to be a revolution?” Lady English asked eagerly.  “And is it true that you are in league with all the Bolshevists on the continent?”

Tallente masked his irritation and answered with a smile.

“Civil war,” he declared, “commences to-morrow.  Every one with a title is to be interned in an asylum, all country houses are to be turned into sanatoriums and all estates will be confiscated.”

“The tiresome man won’t tell us anything,” Lady Alice sighed.

“Of course, he won’t,” Mrs. Ward Levitte observed.  “You can’t announce a revolution beforehand truthfully.”

“If there is a revolution within the next fifteen years,” Tallente said, “I think it will probably be on behalf of the disenfranchised aristocracy, who want the vote back again.”

Lady English and Mrs. Levitte found something else to talk about between themselves.  Lady Somerham, however, had no intention of letting Tallente escape.

“You are a neighbour of my niece in Devonshire, I believe?” she asked.

He admitted the fact monosyllabically.  He was supremely uncomfortable, and it seemed to him that Jane, who was conducting an apparently entertaining conversation with Colonel Fosbrook, might have done something to rescue him.

“My niece has very broad ideas,” Lady Somerham went on.  “Some of her fellow landowners in Devonshire are very much annoyed with the way she has been getting rid of her property.”

“Lady Jane,” he pronounced drily, “is in my opinion very wise.  She is anticipating the legislation to come, which will inevitably restore the land to the people, from whom, in most cases, it was stolen.”

“Well, my husband gave two hundred thousand pounds of good, hard-earned money for Stoughton, where we live,” Mrs. Ward Levitte intervened.  “So far as I know, the money wasn’t stolen from anybody, and I should say that the robbery would begin if the Socialists, or whatever they call themselves, tried to take it away from us to distribute amongst their followers.  What do you think, Mr. Tallente?  My husband, as I dare say you know, is a banker and a very hard-working man.”