on one side and two on the other.  There were four windows to the room, which looked on to St. James’s Park, and the curtains of the windows were dark and heavy,—­as became the gravity of the purposes to which that chamber was appropriated.  In old days it had been the dining-room of one Prime Minister after another.  To Pitt it had been the abode of his own familiar prandial Penates, and Lord Liverpool had been dull there among his dull friends for long year after year.  The Ministers of the present day find it more convenient to live in private homes, and, indeed, not unfrequently carry their Cabinets with them.  But, under Mr. Mildmay’s rule, the meetings were generally held in the old room at the official residence.  Thrice did the aged messenger move each armchair, now a little this way and now a little that, and then look at them as though something of the tendency of the coming meeting might depend on the comfort of its leading members.  If Mr. Mildmay should find himself to be quite comfortable, so that he could hear what was said without a struggle to his ear, and see his colleagues’ faces clearly, and feel the fire without burning his shins, it might be possible that he would not insist upon resigning.  If this were so, how important was the work now confided to the hands of that aged messenger!  When his anxious eyes had glanced round the room some half a dozen times, when he had touched each curtain, laid his hand upon every chair, and dusted certain papers which lay upon a side-table,—­and which had been lying there for two years, and at which no one ever looked or would look,—­he gently crept away and ensconced himself in an easy chair not far from the door of the chamber.  For it might be necessary to stop the attempt of a rash intruder on those secret counsels.

Very shortly there was heard the ring of various voices in the passages,—­the voices of men speaking pleasantly, the voices of men with whom it seemed, from their tone, that things were doing well in the world.  And then a cluster of four or five gentlemen entered the room.  At first sight they seemed to be as ordinary gentlemen as you shall meet anywhere about Pall Mall on an afternoon.  There was nothing about their outward appearance of the august wiggery of statecraft, nothing of the ponderous dignity of ministerial position.  That little man in the square-cut coat,—­we may almost call it a shooting-coat,—­swinging an umbrella and wearing no gloves, is no less a person than the Lord Chancellor,—­Lord Weazeling,—­who made a hundred thousand pounds as Attorney-General, and is supposed to be the best lawyer of his age.  He is fifty, but he looks to be hardly over forty, and one might take him to be, from his appearance,—­perhaps a clerk in the War Office, well-to-do, and popular among his brother-clerks.  Immediately with him is Sir Harry Coldfoot, also a lawyer by profession, though he has never practised.  He has been in the House for nearly thirty years, and is now at the