“I’m going down to Liverpool,” he said, presently, “to meet Trafford Romaine.”

It gratified him to see the gleam in Miss Derwent’s eyes the’ announcement had its hoped-for effect.  Trafford Romaine, the Atlas of our Colonial world; the much-debated, the universally interesting champion of Greater British interests!  She knew, of course, that Arnold Jacks was his friend; no one could talk with Mr. Jacks for half an hour without learning that; but the off-hand mention of their being about to meet this very day had an impressiveness for Irene.

“I saw that he was coming to England.”

“From the States—­yes.  He has been over there on a holiday—­ merely a holiday.  Of course, the papers have tried to find a meaning in it.  That kind of thing amuses him vastly.  He says in his last letter to me——­”

Carelessly, the letter was drawn from an inner pocket.  Only a page and a half; Arnold read it out.  A bluff and rather slangy epistolary style.

“May I see his hand?” asked Irene, trying to make fun of her wish.

He gave her the letter, and watched her amusedly as she gazed at the first page.  On receiving it back again, he took his penknife, carefully cut out the great man’s signature, and offered it for Irene’s acceptance.

“Thank you.  But you know, of course, that I regard it as a mere curiosity.”

“Oh, yes!  Why not?  So do I the theory of Evolution.”

By a leading question or two, Miss Derwent set her companion talking at large of Trafford Romaine, his views and policies.  The greatest man in the Empire! he declared.  The only man, in fact, who held the true Imperial conception, and had genius to inspire multitudes with his own zeal.  Arnold’s fervour of admiration betrayed him into no excessive vivacity, no exuberance in phrase or unusual gesture such as could conflict with “good form”; he talked like the typical public schoolboy, with a veneering of wisdom current in circles of higher officialdom.  Enthusiasm was never the term for his state of mind; instinctively he shrank from that, as a thing Gallic, “foreign.”  But the spirit of practical determination could go no further.  He followed Trafford Romaine as at school he had given allegiance to his cricket captain; impossible to detect a hint that he felt the life of peoples in any way more serious than the sports of his boyhood, yet equally impossible to perceive how he could have been more profoundly in earnest.  This made the attractiveness of the man; he compelled confidence; it was felt that he never exaggerated in the suggestion of force concealed beneath his careless, mirthful manner.  Irene, in spite of her humorous observation, hung upon his speech.  Involuntarily, she glanced at his delicate complexion, at the whiteness and softness of his ungloved hand, and felt in a subtle way this combination of the physically fine with the morally hard, trenchant, tenacious.  Close your eyes, and Arnold Jacks was a high-bred bulldog endowed with speech; not otherwise would a game animal of that species, advanced to a world-polity, utter his convictions.