“I wish it were possible for me to do something,” he said, drawing near to her.

“There is nothing to be done,” she said, clasping her hands together.  “For me nothing.  I have before me no escape, no hope, no prospect of relief, no place of consolation.  You have everything before you.  You complain of a wound!  You have at least shown that such wounds with you are capable of cure.  You cannot but feel that when I hear your wailings, I must be impatient.  You had better leave me now, if you please.”

“And are we to be no longer friends?” he asked.

“As far as friendship can go without intercourse, I shall always be your friend.”

Then he went, and as he walked down to his office, so intent was he on that which had just passed that he hardly saw the people as he met them, or was aware of the streets through which his way led him.  There had been something in the later words which Lady Laura had spoken that had made him feel almost unconsciously that the injustice of her reproaches was not so great as he had at first felt it to be, and that she had some cause for her scorn.  If her case was such as she had so plainly described it, what was his plight as compared with hers?  He had lost his Violet, and was in pain.  There must be much of suffering before him.  But though Violet were lost, the world was not all blank before his eyes.  He had not told himself, even in his dreariest moments, that there was before him “no escape, no hope, no prospect of relief, no place of consolation.”  And then he began to think whether this must in truth be the case with Lady Laura.  What if Mr. Kennedy were to die?  What in such case as that would he do?  In ten or perhaps in five years time might it not be possible for him to go through the ceremony of falling upon his knees, with stiffened joints indeed, but still with something left of the ardour of his old love, of his oldest love of all?

As he was thinking of this he was brought up short in his walk as he was entering the Green Park beneath the Duke’s figure, by Laurence Fitzgibbon.  “How dare you not be in your office at such an hour as this, Finn, me boy,—­or, at least, not in the House,—­or serving your masters after some fashion?” said the late Under-Secretary.

“So I am.  I’ve been on a message to Marylebone, to find what the people there think about the Canadas.”

“And what do they think about the Canadas in Marylebone?”

“Not one man in a thousand cares whether the Canadians prosper or fail to prosper.  They care that Canada should not go to the States, because,—­though they don’t love the Canadians, they do hate the Americans.  That’s about the feeling in Marylebone,—­and it’s astonishing how like the Maryleboners are to the rest of the world.”

“Dear me, what a fellow you are for an Under-Secretary!  You’ve heard the news about little Violet.”

“What news?”

“She has quarrelled with Chiltern, you know.”