Mr. Gresham, though he strove to speak with gentle words, was evidently very angry with the late President of the Board of Trade; and, moreover, it was quite clear that a bill would be introduced by Mr. Monk himself, which Mr. Gresham was determined to oppose.  If all this came to pass and there should be a close division, Phineas felt that his fate would be sealed.  When he again spoke to Lord Cantrip on the subject, the Secretary of State shrugged his shoulders and shook his head.  “I can only advise you,” said Lord Cantrip, “to forget all that took place in Ireland.  If you will do so, nobody else will remember it.”  “As if it were possible to forget such things,” he said in the letter which he wrote to Mary that night.  “Of course I shall go now.  If it were not for your sake, I should not in the least regret it.”

He had been with Madame Goesler frequently in the winter, and had discussed with her so often the question of his official position that she had declared that she was coming at last to understand the mysteries of an English Cabinet.  “I think you are quite right, my friend,” she said,—­“quite right.  What—­you are to be in Parliament and say that this black thing is white, or that this white thing is black, because you like to take your salary!  That cannot be honest!” Then, when he came to talk to her of money,—­that he must give up Parliament itself, if he gave up his place,—­she offered to lend him money.  “Why should you not treat me as a friend?” she said.  When he pointed out to her that there would never come a time in which he could pay such money back, she stamped her foot and told him that he had better leave her.  “You have high principle,” she said, “but not principle sufficiently high to understand that this thing could be done between you and me without disgrace to either of us.”  Then Phineas assured her with tears in his eyes that such an arrangement was impossible without disgrace to him.

But he whispered to this new friend no word of the engagement with his dear Irish Mary.  His Irish life, he would tell himself, was a thing quite apart and separate from his life in England.  He said not a word about Mary Flood Jones to any of those with whom he lived in London.  Why should he, feeling as he did that it would so soon be necessary that he should disappear from among them?  About Miss Effingham he had said much to Madame Goesler.  She had asked him whether he had abandoned all hope.  “That affair, then, is over?” she had said.

“Yes;—­it is all over now.”

“And she will marry the red-headed, violent lord?”

“Heaven knows.  I think she will.  But she is exactly the girl to remain unmarried if she takes it into her head that the man she likes is in any way unfitted for her.”

“Does she love this lord?”

“Oh yes;—­there is no doubt of that.”  And Phineas, as he made this acknowledgment, seemed to do so without much inward agony of soul.  When he had been last in London he could not speak of Violet and Lord Chiltern together without showing that his misery was almost too much for him.