Then Barry Whalen’s gossip suddenly came to his mind, and he added:  “Fellowes will want to get married some day.  That face and manner will lead him into ways from which there’s only one outlet.”

“Matrimony?” She laughed.  “Oh dear, no, Adrian is much too selfish to marry.”

“I thought that selfishness was one of the elements of successful marriages.  I’ve been told so.”

A curious look stole into her eyes.  All at once she wondered if his words had any hidden meaning, and she felt angrily self-conscious; but she instantly put the reflection away, for if ever any man travelled by the straight Roman road of speech and thought, it was he.  He had only been dealing in somewhat obvious worldly wisdom.

“You ought not to give encouragement to such ideas by repeating them,” she rejoined with raillery.  “This is an age of telepathy and suggestion, and the more silent we are the safer we are.  Now, please, tell me everything—­of the inside, I mean—­about Cecil Rhodes and the Raiders.  Is Rhodes overwhelmed?  And Mr. Chamberlain—­you have seen him?  The papers say you have spent many hours at the Colonial Office.  I suppose you were with him at six o’clock last evening, instead of being here with me, as you promised.”

He shook his head.  “Rhodes?  The bigger a man is the greater the crash when he falls; and no big man falls alone.”

She nodded.  “There’s the sense of power, too, which made everything vibrate with energy, which gave a sense of great empty places filled—­of that power withdrawn and collapsed.  Even the bad great man gone leaves a sense of desolation behind.  Power—­power, that is the thing of all,” she said, her eyes shining and her small fingers interlacing with eager vitality:  “power to set waves of influence in motion which stir the waters on distant shores.  That seems to me the most wonderful thing.”

Her vitality, her own sense of power, seemed almost incongruous.  She was so delicately made, so much the dresden-china shepherdess, that intensity seemed out of relation to her nature.  Yet the tiny hands playing before her with natural gestures like those of a child had, too, a decision and a firmness in keeping with the perfectly modelled head and the courageous poise of the body.  There was something regnant in her, while, too, there was something sumptuous and sensuous and physically thrilling to the senses.  To-day she was dressed in an exquisite blue gown, devoid of all decoration save a little chinchilla fur, which only added to its softness and richness.  She wore no jewelry whatever except a sapphire brooch, and her hair shone and waved like gossamer in the sun.