“You will never bring me out again,” she declared.  “I want some champagne.”

“I never felt more like it myself,” he agreed.  “The Pommery, George, slightly iced, an aperitif now, and the dinner can take its course.  We will linger over the hors d’oeuvres and we are in no hurry.”

George departed and Tallente smiled across at his companion.  It was a wonderful moment, this.  His steady success of the last few months, the triumph of the afternoon had never brought him one of the thrills which were in his pulses at that moment, not one iota of the pleasurable sense of well-being which was warming his veins.  The new menace which had suddenly thrown its shadow across his path was forgotten.  Governments might come or go, a career be made or broken upon the wheel.  He was alone with Jane.

“Now tell me all the news at Woolhanger?” he asked.

“Woolhanger lies under a mantle of snow,” she told him.  “There is a wind blowing there which seems to have come straight from the ice of the North Pole and sounds like the devil playing bowls amongst the hills.”

“The hunting?”

“All stopped, of course.  A few nights ago, two stags came right up to the house and quite a troop of the really wild ponies from over Hawkbridge way.  We’ve never had such a spell of cold in my memory.  It reminded one of the snowstorm in ’Lorna Doone.’—­But after all, I told you all about Woolhanger last night.  I want your news.”

“I seem to have settled down with the Democrats,” he told her.  “I do my best to keep the party in line.  The great trades unions are, of course, our chief difficulty, but I think we are making progress even with them.  Some of the miners’ representatives dined with me at the Trocadero the other night.  Good fellows they are, too.  There is only one great difficulty,” he went on, “in the consolidation of my party, and that is to get a little more breadth into the views of these men who represent the leading industries.  They are obsessed with the duties that they owe to their own artificers and the labour connected with the particular industry they represent.  It is hard to make them see the importance of any other subject.  Yet we need these very men as lawmakers.  I want them to study production and the laws of production from a universal point of view.”

“I can quite understand,” she acquiesced sympathetically, “that you have a difficult class of men to deal with.  Tell me what the evening papers mean by their placards?”

“We had a small tactical success against the Government this afternoon,” he explained.  “It doesn’t really amount to anything.  We are not ready for their resignation at the moment, any more than they are ready to resign.”

“You are an object of terror to all my people,” she confided smilingly.  “They say that Horlock dare not go to the country and that you could turn him out to-morrow if you cared to.”

“So much for politics,” he remarked drily.