Jane laid her hand for a moment upon his arm.

“Why aren’t you oftener enthusiastic?”

He glanced at her swiftly.  Their eyes met.  Fearlessly she held his fingers for a moment,—­a long, wonderful moment.

“I was getting past enthusiasms,” he said; “I was dropping into the dry-as-dust school—­the argumentative, logical, cold, ineffectual school.  The last few months have changed that.  I feel young again.  If Dartrey will give me a free hand, I’ll deliver up to him Miller’s bones.”

Dartrey had come to the dinner in an uncertain frame of mind.  No one knew better than he the sinister power behind Miller.  Yet before Tallente had finished speaking he had made up his mind.

“I’ll stand by you, Tallente,” he declared, “even if it puts us back a year or so.  Miller carries with him always an atmosphere of unwholesome things.  He has got the Bolshevist filth in his blood and I don’t trust him.  No one trusts him.  He shall take his following where he will, and if we are not strong enough to rule without them, we’ll wait.”

It was a compact of curious importance which the two men sealed impulsively with a grip of the hands across the table, and down at Woolhanger, through some dreary months, it was Jane’s greatest pleasure to remember that it was at her table it had been made.

Tallente, seeking about for some excuse to remain for a few moments after the departure of the Dartreys, was relieved of all anxiety by Jane’s calm and dignified remark.

“I can’t part with you just yet, Mr. Tallente,” she said.  “You are not in a hurry, I hope, and you are so close to your rooms that the matter of taxies need not worry you.  And, Mr. Dartrey, next time you come down to my county you must bring your wife over to see me.  Woolhanger is so typically Devonshire, I really think you would be interested.”

“I shall make Stephen bring me in the spring,” Nora promised.  “I shall never forget how fascinated we were with the whole place this last summer.  Don’t forget that you are coming to the House with me tomorrow afternoon.”

Jane smiled.

“I am looking forward to it,” she declared.  “The only annoying part is that that stupid man won’t promise to speak.”

“I shall have so much to say within the next week or so,” Tallente observed, a little grimly, “that I think I had better keep quiet as long as I can.”

The moment for which Tallente had been longing came then.  The front door closed behind the departing guests.  Jane motioned to him to come and sit by her side on the couch.

“I love your friends,” she said.  “I think Mrs. Dartrey is perfectly sweet and Dartrey is just as wonderful as I had pictured him.  They are so strangely unusual,” she went on.  “I can scarcely believe, even now, that our dinner actually took place in my little room here—­Stephen Dartrey, the man I have read about all my life, and this brilliant young wife of his.  Thank you so much, dear friend, for bringing them.”