They sat for a long while talking, the riverside traffic drowsily accompanying their voices, the flowers drowsily filling the room with scent; and when Courtier left, his heart was sore.  She had not spoken of herself at all, but had talked nearly all the time of Barbara, praising her beauty and high spirit; growing pale once or twice, and evidently drinking in with secret avidity every allusion to Miltoun.  Clearly, her feelings had not changed, though she would not show them!  Courtier’s pity for her became well-nigh violent.

It was in such a mood, mingled with very different feelings, that he donned evening clothes and set out to attend the last gathering of the season at Valleys House, a function which, held so late in July, was perforce almost perfectly political.

Mounting the wide and shining staircase, that had so often baffled the arithmetic of little Ann, he was reminded of a picture entitled ’The Steps to Heaven’ in his nursery four-and-thirty years before.  At the top of this staircase, and surrounded by acquaintances, he came on Harbinger, who nodded curtly.  The young man’s handsome face and figure appeared to Courtier’s jaundiced eye more obviously successful and complacent than ever; so that he passed him by sardonically, and manoeuvred his way towards Lady Valleys, whom he could perceive stationed, like a general, in a little cleared space, where to and fro flowed constant streams of people, like the rays of a star.  She was looking her very best, going well with great and highly-polished spaces; and she greeted Courtier with a special cordiality of tone, which had in it, besides kindness towards one who must be feeling a strange bird, a certain diplomatic quality, compounded of desire, as it were, to ‘warn him off,’ and fear of saying something that might irritate and make him more dangerous.  She had heard, she said, that he was bound for Persia; she hoped he was not going to try and make things more difficult there; then with the words:  “So good of you to have come!” she became once more the centre of her battlefield.

Perceiving that he was finished with, Courtier stood back against a wall and watched.  Thus isolated, he was like a solitary cuckoo contemplating the gyrations of a flock of rooks.  Their motions seemed a little meaningless to one so far removed from all the fetishes and shibboleths of Westminster.  He heard them discussing Miltoun’s speech, the real significance of which apparently had only just been grasped.  The words ‘doctrinaire,’ ‘extremist,’ came to his ears, together with the saying ’a new force.’  People were evidently puzzled, disturbed, not pleased—­as if some star not hitherto accounted for had suddenly appeared amongst the proper constellations.

Searching this crowd for Barbara, Courtier had all the time an uneasy sense of shame.  What business had he to come amongst these people so strange to him, just for the sake of seeing her!  What business had he to be hankering after this girl at all, knowing in his heart that he could not stand the atmosphere she lived in for a week, and that she was utterly unsuited for any atmosphere that he could give her; to say nothing of the unlikelihood that he could flutter the pulses of one half his age!