“So we are immortalised!” she exclaimed, smiling.

“That wretched rag!” he replied.  “I was hoping you wouldn’t see it.”

“Mother was here with a copy before eleven o’clock.”

Tallente made a grimace.

“Have you sworn to abjure me and all my works?”

“So much so,” she told him, “that I have been here waiting for you for at least half an hour and I have put on the gown you said you liked best.  Some one said in a book I was reading last week that affection was proved only by trifles.  I have certainly never before in my life altered my scheme of clothes to please any man.”

He raised her fingers to his lips.

“You are exercising,” he said, “the most wonderful gift of your sex.  You are providing an oasis—­more than that, a paradise—­for a disheartened toiler.  It seems that I have enemies whose very existence I never guessed at.”

“Well, does that matter very much?” she asked cheerfully.  “It was one of your late party, wasn’t it, who said that the making of enemies was the only reward of political success?”

“A cheap enough saying,” Tallente sighed, “yet with the germs of truth in it.  I don’t mind the allusion to a sinister rumour.  The air will be thick with them before long.  The other—­well, it’s beneath criticism but it hurts.”

She laughed whole-heartedly.

“Andrew,” she said, “for the first time in my life I am ashamed of you.  Here am I, hidebound in conventions, and I could just summon indignation enough to send the paper down to the kitchen to be burnt.  Since then I have not even thought of it.  I was far more angry that any one should anticipate the troubles which you have to face.  Come and sit down.”

She led him to the couch and held his fingers in hers as she leaned back in a corner.

“I honestly believe,” she went on gently, “that the world is not sufficiently grateful to those who toil for her.  Criticism has become a habit of life.  Nobody believes or wants to believe in the altruist any longer.  I believe that if to-day a rich man stripped himself of all his possessions and obeyed the doctrines of the Bible by giving them to the poor, the Daily something or other would worry around until they found some interested motive, and the Daily something or other else would succeed in proving the man a hypocrite.”

He smiled and in the lightening of his face she appreciated for the first time a certain strained look about his eyes and the drawn look about the mouth.

“You are worrying about all this!” she exclaimed.

“Yes, in a way I am worrying,” he confessed simply.  “Not about the storm itself.  I am ready to face that and I think I shall be a stronger and a saner man when the battle has started.  In the meantime, I think that what has happened to me is this.  I have arrived just at that time of life when a man takes stock of himself and his doings, criticises his own past and wonders whether the things he has proposed doing in the future are worth while.”