Staring round with a vague half-smile at everybody within nodding distance, Her Serene Highness made one of her characteristic exits, which Lady Caroline declared always reminded her of a scrambled egg slipping off a piece of toast.  At the entrance she stopped for a moment to exchange a word or two with a young man who had just arrived.  From a corner where he was momentarily hemmed in by a group of tea-consuming dowagers, Comus recognised the newcomer as Courtenay Youghal, and began slowly to labour his way towards him.  Youghal was not at the moment the person whose society he most craved for in the world, but there was at least the possibility that he might provide an opportunity for a game of bridge, which was the dominant desire of the moment.  The young politician was already surrounded by a group of friends and acquaintances, and was evidently being made the recipient of a salvo of congratulation—­ presumably on his recent performances in the Foreign Office debate, Comus concluded.  But Youghal himself seemed to be announcing the event with which the congratulations were connected.  Had some dramatic catastrophe overtaken the Government, Comus wondered.  And then, as he pressed nearer, a chance word, the coupling of two names, told him the news.

CHAPTER XI

After the momentous lunch at the Corridor Restaurant Elaine had returned to Manchester Square (where she was staying with one of her numerous aunts) in a frame of mind that embraced a tangle of competing emotions.  In the first place she was conscious of a dominant feeling of relief; in a moment of impetuosity, not wholly uninfluenced by pique, she had settled the problem which hours of hard thinking and serious heart-searching had brought no nearer to solution, and, although she felt just a little inclined to be scared at the headlong manner of her final decision, she had now very little doubt in her own mind that the decision had been the right one.  In fact the wonder seemed rather that she should have been so long in doubt as to which of her wooers really enjoyed her honest approval.  She had been in love, these many weeks past with an imaginary Comus, but now that she had definitely walked out of her dreamland she saw that nearly all the qualities that had appealed to her on his behalf had been absent from, or only fitfully present in, the character of the real Comus.  And now that she had installed Youghal in the first place of her affections he had rapidly acquired in her eyes some of the qualities which ranked highest in her estimation.  Like the proverbial buyer she had the happy feminine tendency of magnifying the worth of her possession as soon as she had acquired it.  And Courtenay Youghal gave Elaine some justification for her sense of having chosen wisely.  Above all other things, selfish and cynical though he might appear at times, he was unfailingly courteous and considerate towards her.  That was a circumstance which would always