Dartrey was thoughtful.

“I dare say you are right,” he admitted, “but if he needs an Aspasia, surely she could be found?”

Nora rested her head upon her fingers.  She seemed to be watching intently the dancing flames.  Her broad, womanly forehead was troubled, her soft brown eyes pensive.

“He is fifty years old,” she said.  “It is rather an anomalous age.  At fifty a man’s taste is almost hypercritical and his attraction to my sex is on the wane.  No, the problem isn’t so easy.”

Dartrey had finished tea and was feeling for his cigarette case.

“I rather fancied, Nora, that he was attracted by you.”

“Well, he isn’t, then,” she replied, with a smile.

“He was rather by way of thinking that he was, the other night, but that was simply because he was in a curiously unsettled state and he felt that I was sympathetic.”

“You are a very clever woman, Nora,” he said, looking across at her.  “You could make him care for you if you chose.”

“Is that to be my sacrifice to the cause?” she asked.  “Am I to give my soul to its wrong keeper, that our party may flourish?”

“You don’t like Tallente?”

“I like him immensely,” she contradicted vigorously.  “If I weren’t hopelessly in love with some one else, I could find it perfectly easy to try and make life a different place for him.”

He looked at her with trouble in his kind eyes.  It was as though he had suddenly stumbled upon a tragedy.

“I have never guessed this about you, Nora,” he murmured.

“You are not observant of small things,” she answered, a little bitterly.

“Who is the man?”

“That I shall not tell you.”

“Do I know him?”

“Less, I should say, than any one of your acquaintance.”

He was silent for a moment or two.  Then it chanced that the telephone rang for him, with a message from the House of Commons.  He gave some instructions to his secretary.

“It is a queer thing,” he remarked, as he replaced the receiver, “how far our daily work and our ambitions take us out of our immediate environment.  I see you day by day, Nora, I have known you intimately since your school days—­and I never guessed.”

“You never guessed and I have no time to suffer,” she answered.  “So we go on until the breaking time comes, until one part of ourselves conquers and the other loses.  It is rather like that just now with Andrew Tallente.  A few more years and it will probably be like that with me.”

He threw his cigarette away as though the flavour had suddenly become distasteful and sat drumming with his fingers upon the table, his eyes fixed upon Nora.

“Tallente’s position,” he said thoughtfully, “one can understand.  He is married, isn’t he, and with all the splendid breadth of his intellectual outlook he is still harassed by the social fetters of his birth and bringing up.  I can conceive Tallente as a person too highminded to seek to evade the law and too scornful for intrigue.  But you, Nora, how is it that your love brings you unhappiness?  You are young and free, and surely,” he concluded, with a little sigh, “when you choose you can make yourself irresistible.”