“It isn’t.  You forget that James and I have our little ambitions too—­the ambition of a master for a favourite pupil.  If you were a failure we should both be bitterly disappointed.  Don’t you see?  And as for leaving us—­why need you?  We should miss you horribly.  You’ve never been quite our paid servant.  And now you’re something like our son.”  Tears started in the sweet lady’s clear eyes.  “Even if you did go to your own chambers, I shouldn’t let our new secretary have this room”—­they were in what the household called “the office”—­really Paul’s luxuriously furnished private sitting room, which contained his own little treasures of books and pictures and bits of china and glass accumulated during the six years of easeful life—­“He will have the print room, which nobody uses from one year’s end to another, and which is far more convenient for the street door.  And the same at Drane’s Court.  So when you no longer work for us, my dear boy, our home will be yours, as long as you’re content to stay, just because we love you.”

Her hand was on his shoulder and his head was bent.  “God grant,” said he, “that I may be worthy of your love.”

He looked up and met her eyes.  Her hand was still on his shoulder.  Then very simply he bent down and kissed her on the cheek.

He told his Princess all about it.  She listened with dewy eyes.  “Ah, Paul,” she said.  “That ‘precious seeing’ of love—­I never had it till you came.  I was blind.  I never knew that there were such beautiful souls as Ursula Winwood in the world.”

“Dear, how I love you for saying that!” cried Paul.

“But it’s true.”

“That is why,” said he.

So the happiest young man in London worked and danced through the season, knowing that the day of emancipation was at hand.  His transference from the Winwoods to the League was fixed for October i.  He made great plans for an extension of the League’s, activities, dreamed of a palace for headquarters with the banner of St. George flying proudly over it, an object-lesson for the nation.  One day in July while. he was waiting for Colonel Winwood in the lobby of the House of Commons, Frank Ayres stopped in the middle of a busy rush and shook hands.

“Been down to Hickney Heath again?  I would if I were you.  Rouse ’em up.”

As the words of a Chief Whip are apt to be significant, Paul closeted himself with the President of the Hickney Heath Lodge, who called the Secretary of the local Conservative Association to the interview.  The result was that Paul was invited to speak at an anti-Budget meeting convened by the Association.  He spoke, and repeated his success.  The Conservative newspapers the next morning gave a resume of his speech.  His Sophie, coming to sign letters in her presidential capacity, brought him the cuttings, a proceeding which he thought adorable.  The season ended triumphantly.