The Fortunate Youth by William J. Locke (page 4)

any high-born youth in the land might well have been fluttered by signs of peculiar favour from Princess Sophie Zobraska. Why’ then, should Paul be blamed for walking on air instead of greasy pavement on the way from Berkeley Square to Portland Place? Moreover, as sanity returned to him, his quick sense recognized in his Princess’s offer to support him, a lovely indiscretion. Foreign ladies of high position must be chary of their public appearances. Between the row-boat on the Serpentine and the platform in the drill hall, Hickney Heath, the difference was but one of degree. And for him alone was this indiscretion about to be committed. His exultation was tempered by tender solicitude.

At dinner that evening–he was dining alone with the Winwoods– he said: “I’ve persuaded the Princess to come to our meeting on Friday. Isn’t it good of her?”

“Very good,” replied Colonel Winwood. “But what interest can she take in the lower walks of English politics?”

“It isn’t English politics,” said Paul. “It’s world politics. The Princess is an aristocrat and is tremendously keen on the Conservative principle. She thinks our scheme for keeping the youth of the nation free from the taint of Socialism is magnificent.”

“H’m!” said the Colonel.

“And I thought Miss Winwood would be pleased if I inveigled Her Highness on to the platform,” said Paul.

“Why, of course it’s a good thing,” assented the Colonel. “But how the deuce did you get her?”

“Yes, how?” asked Miss Winwood, with a smile in her straight blue eyes.

“How does one get anything one wants in this world,” said Paul, “except by going at it, hammer and tongs?”

A little later, when Paul opened the dining-room for her to pass out, she touched his shoulder affectionately and laughed. “Hammer and tongs to Sophie Zobraska! Oh, Paul, aren’t you a bit of a humbug?”

Perhaps he was. But he was ingenuous in his desire to shield his Princess’s action from vain conjecture. It were better that he should be supposed, in vulgar phrase, to have roped her in, as he had roped in a hundred other celebrities in his time. For there the matter ended. On the other hand, if he proclaimed the lady’s spontaneous offer, it might be subjected to heaven knew how many interpretations. Paul owed much of his success in the world to such instinctive delicacies. He worked far into the night, composing his speech on England’s greatness to the beautiful eyes of his French Princess.

The Young England League was his pet political interest. It had been inaugurated some years before he joined the Winwoods. Its objects were the training of the youth, the future electorate of England, in the doctrines of Imperialism, Constitutionalism and sound civicism, as understood by the intellectual Conservatives. Its mechanical aims were to establish lodges throughout the country. Every town and rural district should have its lodge, in connection wherewith should be not only addresses on political and social subjects, but also football and cricket clubs, entertainments for both sexes such as dances, whist-drives, excursions of archaeological and educational interest, and lantern (and, later, cinematographic) lectures on the wide aspects of Imperial Britain. Its appeal was to the young, the recruit in the battle of life, who in a year or two would qualify for a vote and, except for blind passion and prejudice, not know what the deuce to do with it. The octogenarian Earl of Watford was President; Colonel Winwood was one of a long list of Vice-Presidents; Miss Winwood was on the Council; a General Hankin, a fussy, incompetent person past his prime, was Honorary Secretary.

Paul worked with his employers for a year on the League thinking little of its effectiveness. One day, when they spoke despairingly of progress, he said, not in so many words, but in effect: “Don’t you see what’s wrong? This thing is run for young people, and you’ve got old fossils like Lord Watford and General Hankin running it. Let me be Assistant Secretary to Hankin’ and I’ll make things hum.”

And thinking the words of the youth were wise, they used their influence with the Council, and Paul became Assistant Secretary, and after a year or two things began to hum so disconcertingly that General Hankin resigned in order to take the Presidency of the Wellingtonian Defence Association, and almost automatically Paul slipped into his place. With the instinct of the man of affairs he persuaded the Council to change his title. An Honorary Secretary is but a dilettante, an amateur carrying no weight, whereas an Organizing Secretary is a devil of a fellow professedly dynamic. So Paul became Organizing Secretary of the Young England League, and made things hum all the louder. He put fresh life into local Committees and local Secretaries by a paternal interest in their doings, making them feel the pulsations of the throbbing heart of headquarters. If a local lodge was in need of speakers, he exercised his arts of persuasion and sent them down in trainloads. He visited personally as many lodges as his other work permitted. In fact, he was raising the League from a jejune experiment into a flourishing organization. To his secret delight, old Lord Watford resigned the chairmanship owing to the infirmities of old age, and Lord Harbury, a young and energetic peer whom Paul had recently driven into the ranks of the Vice-Presidents, was elected in his stead. Paul felt the future of the League was assured.

With a real Member of Parliament to preside, a. real dean to propose the vote of thanks, another Member of Parliament and two ex-mayors of the borough to add silent dignity to the proceedings, well-known ladies, including, now, a real Princess to grace the assembly, this meeting of the Hickney Heath Lodge was the most important occasion on which Paul had appeared in public.

“I hope you won’t be nervous,” said Miss Winwood. on the morning of the meeting.

“I nervous?” He laughed. “What is there to be nervous about?”

“I’ve had over twenty years’ experience of public speaking, and I’m always nervous when I get UP.”

“It’s only because you persistently refuse to realize what a wonderful woman you are,” he said affectionately.

“And you,” she teased, “are you always realizing what a wonderful man you are?”

He cried with his sunny boldness: “Why not? It’s faith in oneself and one’s destiny that gets things done.”

The drill hall was full. Party feeling ran high in those days at Hickney Heath, for a Liberal had ousted a Unionist from a safe seat at the last General Election, and the stalwarts of the defeated party, thirsting for revenge, supported the new movement. If a child was not born a Conservative, he should be made one. That was the watchword of the League. They were also prepared to welcome the new star that had arisen to guide the younger generation out of the darkness. When, therefore, the Chairman, Mr. John Felton, M.P., who had held minor office in the last administration, had concluded his opening remarks, having sketched briefly the history of the League and intro duced Mr. Paul Savelli, in the usual eulogistic terms, as their irresistible Organizing Secretary, and Paul in his radiant young manhood sprang up before them, the audience greeted him with enthusiastic applause. They had expected, as an audience does expect in an unknown speaker, any one of the usual types of ordinary looking politicians–perhaps bald, perhaps grey headed, perhaps pink and fat–it did not matter; but they did not expect the magnetic personality of this young man of astonishing beauty, with his perfect features, wavy black hair, athletic build and laughing eyes, who seemed the embodiment of youth and joy and purpose and victory.

Before he spoke a word, he knew that he bad them under his control, and he felt the great thrill of it. Physically he had the consciousness of a blaze of light, of a bare barn of an ungalleried place, of thickly-set row upon row of faces, and a vast confused flutter of beating hands. The applause subsided. He turned with his “Mr. Chairman, Your Highness, Ladies and Gentlemen,” to the circle behind him, caught Miss Winwood, his dearest lady’s smile, caught and held for a hundredth part of a second the deep blue eyes of the Princess–she wore a great hat with a grey feather and a chinchilla coat thrown open, and looked the incarnation of all the beauty and all the desires of all his dreams–and with a flash of gladness faced the audience and plunged into his speech.

It began with a denunciation of the Little Englander. At that period one heard, perhaps, more of the Little Englander than one does nowadays–which to some people’s way of thinking is a pity. The Little Englander (according to Paul) was a purblind creature, with political vision ice-bound by the economic condition of the labouring classes in Great Britain. The Little Englander had no sense of patriotism. The Little Englander had no sense of Empire. He had no sense of India, Australia, Canada. He had no sense of foreign nations’ jealousy of England’s secular supremacy. He had a distinct idea, however, of three nationalities; those of Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The inhabitants of those three small nations took peculiar pains to hammer that idea into his head. But of England he had no conception save as a mere geographical expression, a little bit of red on a map of Europe, a vague place where certain sections of the population clamoured for-much pay and little work. His dream was a parochial Utopia where the Irish peasant, the Welsh farmer and the Scottish crofter should live in luxury, and when these were satisfied, the English operative should live in moderate comfort. The Little Englander, in his insensate altruism, dreamed of these three nations entirely independent of England, except in the trivial matter of financial support. He wanted Australia, Canada, South Africa, to sever their links from him and take up with America, Germany, Switzerland–anybody so long as they did not interfere with his gigantic scheme for providing tramps in Cromarty with motor cars and dissolute Welsh shepherds with champagne. As for India, why not give it up to a benign native government which would depend upon the notorious brotherly love between Hindoo and Mussulman? If Russia, foolish, unawakened Russia, took possession of it, what would it matter to the miner of Merthyr Tydvil? As for England, provided such a country existed, she would be perfectly happy. The rich would provide for the poor–and what did anyone want further? Paul took up the Little Englander in his arms and tossed him in the air, threw him on the ground and jumped upon him. He cast his mutilated fragments with rare picturesqueness upon a Guy Fawkes bonfire. The audience applauded vociferously. He waited with a gay smile for silence, scanning them closely for the first time; and suddenly the smile faded from his face. In the very centre of the third row sat two people who did not applaud. They were Barney Bill and Jane.

He looked at them fascinated. There could be no mistake. Barney Bill’s cropped, shoe-brush hair was white as the driven snow; but the wry, bright-eyed face was unchanged. And Jane, quietly and decently dressed, her calm eyes fixed on him, was–Jane. These two curiously detached themselves against the human background. It was only the sudden stillness of the exhausted applause that brought him to consciousness of his environment; that, and a heaven-sent fellow at the back of the audience who shouted: “Go on, sonny!”

Whereupon he plucked himself together with a swift toss of the head, and laughed his gay laugh. “Of course I’m going on, if you will let me. This is only the beginning of what I’ve got to tell you of the Englishman who fouls the nest of England–who fouls the nest of all that matters in the future history of mankind.”

There was more applause. It was the orator’s appeal to the mass. It set Paul back into the stream of his argument. He forgot Barney Bill and Jane, and went on with his speech, pointedly addressing the young, telling them what England was, what England is, what Englishmen, if they are true to England, shall be. It was for the young, those who came fresh to life with the glories of England fresh in their memories, from Crecy to the Armada, from the Armada to Waterloo, to keep the banner of England flying over their topmost roofs.

It was a fighting, enthusiastic, hyperbolic speech, glowing, as did the young face of the speaker, with the divine fire of youth. It ended triumphantly. He sat down to an ovation. Smiles and handshakes and words of praise surrounded him on the platform. Miss Winwood pressed his hand and said, “Well done.” The Princess regarded him with flushed cheeks and starry eyes. It was only when silence fell on the opening words of the Dean of Halifax that he searched the rows in front for Barney Bill and Jane. They were still there. Impulsively he scribbled a few lines on a scrap of paper torn from his rough notes: “I must see you. Wait outside the side entrance for me after the meeting is over. Love to you both. Paul.” A glance round showed him an attendant of the hall lurking at the back of the platform. He slipped quietly from his seat by the Chairman’s side and gave the man the paper with directions as to its destination. Then he returned. just before the Dean ended, he saw the note delivered. Jane read it, whispered its contents to Bill and seemed to nod acquiescence. It was fitting that these two dear ghosts of the past should appear for the first time in his hour of triumph. He longed to have speech with them, The Dean of Halifax was brief, the concluding ceremonies briefer. The audience gave Paul a parting cheer and dispersed, while Paul, the hero of the evening, received the congratulations of his friends.

“Those are things that needed saying, but we’re too cautious to say them,” remarked the Chairman.

“We’ve got to be,” said Colonel Winwood.

“The glory of irresponsibility,” smiled the Dean.

“You don’t often get this kind of audience,” Paul answered with a laugh. “A political infants’ school. One has to treat things in broad splashes.”

“You almost persuade me to be an Englishwoman,” said. the Princess.

Paul bowed. “But what more beautiful thing can there be than a Frenchwoman with England in her heart? Je ne demande pas mieux.”

And the Princess did not put her hands to her ears.

The group passed slowly from the platform through a sort of committee room at the back, and reached the side entrance, Here they lingered, exchanging farewells. The light streamed dimly through the door on the strip of pavement between two hedges of spectators, and on the panelling and brass-work of an automobile by the curb. A chauffeur, with rug on arm, stepped forward and touched his cap, as the Princess appeared, and opened the door of the car. Paul, bare-headed, accompanied her across the pavement. Halt way she stopped for a second to adjust a slipping fur. He aided her quickly and received a bright smile of thanks. She entered the car–held out her hand for, his kiss.

“Come and see me soon. I’ll write or telephone.”

The car rolled away. The Winwoods’ carriage drove up.

It was a fighting, enthusiastic, hyperbolic speech, glowing with the divine fire of youth.

“Can we give you a lift home, Paul?” asked Miss Winwood.

“No thanks, dearest lady. There are one or two little things I must do before I go.”

“Good night.”

“Good night, Paul,” said Colonel Winwood, shaking hands. “A thundering good speech.”

CHAPTER XIII

PAUL looked from side to side at the palely lit faces of the spectators, trying to distinguish Barney Bill and Jane. But he did not see them. He was disappointed and depressed, seized with a curious yearning for his own people. Vehicle after vehicle drew up and carried away the remainder of the platform group, and Paul was left in the doorway with the President and Honorary Secretary of the local lodge. The little crowd began to melt away. Suddenly his heart leaped and, after a hasty good night to the two officials, he sprang forward and, to their astonishment, gripped the hand of a bent and wizened old man.

“Barney Bill! This is good. Where is Jane?”

“Close by,” said Bill.

The President and Honorary Secretary waved farewells and marched away. Out of the gloom came Jane, somewhat shyly. He took both her hands and looked upon her, and laughed. “My dear Jane! What ages since we lost each other!”

“Seven years, Mr. Savelli.”

“‘Mr. Savelli I’ Rubbish! Paul.”

“Begging your pardon,” said Barney Bill, “but I’ve got a pal ‘ere what I’ve knowed long before you was born, and he’d like to tell yer how he enjoyed your speech.”

A tall man, lean and bearded, and apparently very well dressed, came forward.

“This is my old pal, Silas Finn,” said Bill.

“Delighted to meet you, Mr. Finn,” said Paul, shaking hands.

“I too,” said the man gravely.

“Silas Finn’s a Councillor of the Borough,” said Bill proudly.

“You should have been on the platform,” said Paul.

“I attended in my private capacity,” replied Mr. Finn.

He effaced himself. Paul found himself laughing into Barney Bill’s twinkling eyes. “Dear old Bill,” he cried, clapping his old friend on the shoulder. “How are things going? How’s the caravan? I’ve looked out for it on so many country roads.”

“I’m thinking of retiring,” said Bill. “I can only do a few summer months now–and things isn’t what they was.”

“And Jane?” He turned to her.

“I’m Mr. Finn’s secretary.”

“Oh,” said Paul. Mr. Finn, then, was an important person.

The drill hall attendant shut the door, and save for the street lamps they were in gloom. There was an embarrassed little silence. Paul broke it by saying: “We must exchange addresses, and fix up a meeting for a nice long talk.”

“If you would like to have a talk with your old friends now, my house is at your disposal,” said Mr. Finn, in a soft, melancholy voice. “It is not far from here.”

“That’s very kind of you–but I couldn’t trespass on your hospitality.”

“Gor bless you,” exclaimed Barney Bill. “Nothing of the kind. Didn’t I tell yer I’ve knowed him since we was lads together? And Jane lives there.”

Paul laughed. “In that case–”

“You’ll be most welcome,” said Mr. Finn. “This way.”

He went ahead with Barney Bill, whose queer side limp awoke poignant memories of the Bludston brickfield. Paul followed with Jane.

“And what have you been doing?” he asked.

“Typewriting. Then Bill came across Mr. Finn, whom he hadn’t seen for years, and got me the position of secretary. Otherwise I’ve been doing nothing particular.”

“If you knew what a hunt I had years ago to find you,” he said, and began to explain the set of foolish circumstances when they turned the corner of the drill hall and found a four-wheeled cab waiting.

“I had already engaged it for my friends and myself,” Mr. Finn explained. “Will you get in?”

Jane and Paul and Mr. Finn entered the cab. Barney Bill, who liked air and for whom the raw November night was filled apparently with balmy zephyrs, clambered in his crablike way next the driver. They started.

“What induced you to come to-night?” Paul asked.

“We saw the announcement in the newspapers,” replied Jane. “Barney Bill said the Mr. Paul Savelli could, be no one else but you. I said it couldn’t.”

“Why?” he asked sharply.

“There are heaps of people of the same name.”

“But you didn’t think I was equal to it?”

She laughed a short laugh. “That’s just how you used to talk. You haven’t changed much.”

“I hope I haven’t,” replied Paul earnestly. “And I don’t think you’ve changed either.”

“Very little has happened to change me,” said Jane.

The cab lumbered on through dull, dimly lit, residential roads. Only by the swinging gleam of an occasional street lamp could Paul distinguish the faces of his companions. “I hope you’re on our side, Mr. Finn,” he said politely to his host, who sat on the small back seat.

“I don’t disagree with much that you said to-night. But you are on the side of wealth and aristocracy. I am on the side of the downtrodden and oppressed.”

“But so am I,” cried Paul. “The work of every day of my life tends to help them.”

“You’re a Conservative and I’m a Radical.”

“What do labels matter? We’re both attacking the same problem, only from different angles.”

“Very likely, Mr. Savelli; but you’ll pardon me if, according to my political creed, I regard your angle as an obtuse one.”

Paul wondered greatly who he could be, this grave, intelligent friend of Barney Bill’s, who spoke with such dignity and courtesy. In his speech was a trace of rough accent; but his words were chosen with precision.

“You think we glance off, whereas your attack is more direct,” laughed Paul.

“That is so. I hope you don’t mind my saying it. You were the challenger.”

“I was. But anyhow we’re not going to be enemies.”

“God forbid,” said Mr. Finn.

Presently the cab stopped before a fairly large detached house standing back from the road. A name which Paul could not decipher was painted on the top bar of the gate. They trooped through and up some steps to the front door, which Mr. Finn opened with his latchkey. The first impression that Paul had on entering a wide vestibule was a blaze of gilt frames containing masses of bright, fresh paint. A parlour-maid appeared, and helped with hats and coats.

“We are having a very simple supper, Mr. Savelli. Will you join us?” said Mr. Finn.

“With the greatest pleasure,” said Paul.

The host threw open the dining-room door on the right. Jane and Paul entered; were alone for a few moments, during which Paul heard Barney Bill say in a hoarse whisper: “Let me have my hunk of bread and beef in the kitchen, Silas. You know as how I hates a fork and I likes to eat in my shirt sleeves.”

Paul seized Jane by the arms and regarded her luminously. He murmured: “Did you hear? The dear old chap!”

She raised clear, calm eyes. “Aren’t you shocked?”

He shook her. “What do you take me for?”

Jane was rebellious. “For what girls in my position generally call a ‘toff.’ You—”

“You’re horrid,” said Paul.

“The word’s horrid, not me. You’re away up above us.”

“‘Us’ seems to be very prosperous, anyhow,” said Paul, looking round him. Jane watched him jealously and saw his face change. The dining room, spaciously proportioned, was, like the vestibule, a mass of gilt frames and staring paint. Not an inch of wall above the oak dado was visible. Crude landscapes, wooden portraits, sea studies with waves of corrugated iron, subject pictures of childishly sentimental appeal, blinded the eyes. It looked as if a kindergarten had been the selecting committee for an exhibition of the Royal Academy. It looked also as if the kindergarten had replaced the hanging committee also. It was a conglomerate massacre. It was pictorial anarchy. It was individualism baresark, amok, crazily frantic. And an execrably vile, nerve-destroying individualism at that.

Paul released Jane, who kept cool, defiant eyes on him.

“What do you think of it?”

He smiled. “A bit disconcerting.”

“The whole house is like this.”

“It’s so new,” said Paul.

He looked about him again. The long table was plainly laid for three at the far end. The fare consisted of a joint of cold beef, a cold tart suggestive of apple, a bit of Cheshire cheese, and celery in a glass vase. Of table decoration of any kind there was no sign. A great walnut monstrosity meagrely equipped performed the functions of a sideboard. The chairs, ten straight-backed, and two easy by the fireplace, of which one was armless, were upholstered in saddlebag, yellow and green. In the bay of the red-curtained window was a huge terra-cotta bust of an ivy-crowned and inane Austrian female. There was a great fireplace in which a huge fire blazed cheerily, and on the broad, deep hearth stood little coloured plaster figures of stags, of gnomes, of rabbits, one ear dropping, the other ear cocked, of galloping hounds unknown to the fancy, scenting and pursuing an invisible foe.

She watched him as he scanned the room.

“Who is Mr. Finn?” he asked in a low voice.

“Many years ago he was ‘Finn’s Fried Fish.’ Now he’s ‘Fish Palaces, Limited.’ They’re all over London. You can’t help seeing them even from a motor car.”

“I’ve seen them,” said Paul.

The argument outside the door having ended in a victory for the host, he entered the room, pushing Barney Bill gently in front of him. For the first time Paul saw him in the full light. He beheld a man sharply featured, with hair and beard, once raven-black, irregularly streaked with white–there seemed to be no intermediary shades of grey–and deep melancholy eyes. There hung about him the atmosphere of infinite, sorrowful patience that might mark a Polish patriot. As the runner of a successful fried fish concern he was an incongruity. As well, thought Paul, picture the late Cardinal Newman sharpening knife on steel outside a butcher’s shop, and crying, “buy, buy,” in lusty invitation. Then Paul noticed that he was oddly apparelled. He wore the black frock-coat suit of a Methodist preacher at the same time as the rainbow tie, diamond tie-pin, heavy gold watch-chain, diamond ring and natty spats of a professional bookmaker. The latter oddities, however, did not detract from the quiet, mournful dignity of his face and manner. Paul felt himself in the presence of an original personality.

The maid came in and laid a fourth place. Mr. Finn waved Paul to a seat on his right, Barney Bill to one next Paul; Jane sat on his left.

“I will ask a blessing,” said Mr. Finn.

He asked one for two minutes in the old-fashioned Evangelical way, bringing his guest into his address to the Almighty with an almost pathetic courtesy. “I am afraid, Mr. Savelli,” said he, when he sat down and began to carve the beef, “I have neither wine nor spirits to offer you. I am a strict teetotaller; and so is Miss Seddon. But as I knew my old friend Simmons would be unhappy without his accustomed glass of beer–”

“That’s me,” said Barney Bill, nudging Paul with his elbow. “Simmons. You never knowed that afore, did yer? Beg pardon, guv’nor, for interrupting.”

“Well, there’s a jug of beer–and that is all at this hour, except water, that I can put before you.”

Paul declared that beer was delicious and peculiarly acceptable after public speaking, and demonstrated his appreciation by draining the glass which the maid poured out.

“You wanted that badly, sonny,” said Barney Bill. “The next thing to drinking oneself is to see another chap what enjoys swallering it.”

“Bill!” said Jane reprovingly.

Barney Bill cocked his white poll across the table with the perkiness of a quaint bird–Paul saw that the years had brought a striation of tiny red filaments to his weather-beaten face–and fixed her with his little glittering eyes. “Bill what? You think I’m ‘urting his feelings?” He jerked a thumb towards his host. “I ain’t. He thinks good drink’s bad because bad has come of it to him–not that he ever took a drop too much, mind yer–but bad has come of it to him, and I think good drink’s good because nothing but good has come of it to me. And we’ve agreed to differ. Ain’t we, Silas?”

“If every man were as moderate as you, and I am sure as Mr. Savelli, I should have nothing to say against it. Why should I? But the working man, unhappily, is not moderate.”

“I see,” said Paul. “You preach, or advocate–I think you preach–total abstinence, and so feel it your duty to abstain yourself.”

“That is so,” said Mr. Finn, helping himself to mustard. “I don’t wish to bore you with my concerns; but I’m a fairly large employer of labour. Now I have found that by employing only pledged abstainers I get extraordinary results. I exact a very high rate of insurance, towards a fund–I need not go into details–to which I myself contribute a percentage–a far higher rate than would be possible if they spent their earnings on drink. I invest the whole lot in my business–their stoppages from wages and my contributions. I guarantee them 3 per cent.; I give them, actually, the dividends that accrue to the holders of ordinary stock in my company. They also have the general advantages of insurance– sickness, burial, maternity, and so forth–that they would get from an ordinary benefit society.”

“But that’s enormous,” cried Paul, with keen interest. “On the face of it, it seems impossible. It seems entirely uneconomic. Co-operative trading is one thing; private insurance another. But how can you combine the two?”

“The whole secret lies in the marvellously increased efficiency of the employee.” He developed his point.

Paul listened attentively. “But,” said he, when his host concluded, “isn’t it rather risky? Supposing, for the sake of argument, your business failed.”

Mr. Finn held up the lean, brown hand on which the diamond sparkled. “My business cannot fail.”

Paul started. The assertion had a strange solemnity. “Without impertinence,” said he, “why can’t it fail?”

“Because God is guiding it,” said Silas Finn.

The fanatic spoke. Paul regarded him with renewed interest. The black hair streaked with white, banging over the temples on the side away from the parting, the queerly streaked beard, the clear-cut ascetic features, the deep, mournful eyes in whose depths glowed a soul on fire, gave him the appearance of a mad but sanctified apostle. Barney Bill, who profoundly distrusted all professional drinkers of water, such as Mr. Finn’s employees, ate his cold beef silently, in the happy surmise that no one was paying the least attention to his misperformances with knife, fork and fingers. Jane looked steadily from Paul to Silas and from Silas to Paul.

Paul said: “How do you know God is guiding it?”

At the back of his mind was an impulse of mirth–there was a touch of humorous blasphemy in the conception of the Almighty as managing director of “Fish Palaces, Limited”–but the nominal earthly managing director saw not the slightest humour in the proposition.

“Who is guiding you in your brilliant career?” he asked.

Paul threw out his hands, in the once practised and now natural foreign gesture. “I’m not an atheist. Of course I believe in God, and I thank Him for all His mercies–”

“Yes, yes,” said his host. “That I shouldn’t question. But a successful man’s thanks to God are most often merely conventional. Don’t think I wish to be offensive. I only want to get at the root of things. You are a young man, eight-and-twenty–”

“How do you know that?” laughed Paul.

“Oh, your friends have told me. You are young. You have a brilliant position. You have a brilliant future. Were you born to it?”

There was Jane on the opposite side of the table, entirely uninterested in her food, looking at him in her calm, clear way. She was so wholesome, so sane, in her young yet mature English lower-class beauty. She had broad brows. Her mass of dark brown hair was rather too flawlessly arranged. He felt a second’s irritation at not catching any playfully straying strand. She was still the Jane of his boyhood, but a Jane developed, a Jane from whom no secrets were hid, a searching, questioning and quietly disturbing Jane.

“A man is born to his destiny, whatever destiny may be,” said Paul.

“That is Mohammedan fatalism,” said Mr. Finn, “unless one means by destiny the guiding hand of the Almighty. Do you believe that you’re under the peculiar care of God?”

“Do you, Mr. Finn?”

“I have said so. I ask you. Do you?”

“In a general way, yes,” said Paul. “In your particular sense, no. You question me frankly and I answer frankly. You would not like me to answer otherwise.”

“Certainly not,” said his host.

“Then,” Paul continued, with a smile, “I must say that from my childhood I have been fired with a curious certainty that I would succeed in life. Chance has helped me. How far a divine hand has been specially responsible, it isn’t for me to conjecture. But I know that if I hadn’t believed in myself I shouldn’t have had my small measure of success.”

“You believe in yourself?”

“Yes. And I believe in making others believe in me.”

“That is strange–very strange.” Mr. Finn fixed him with his deep, sorrowful eyes. “You believe that you’re predestined to a great position. You believe that you have in you all that is needful to attain it. That has carried you through. Strange!” He put his hand to his temple, elbow on table, and still regarded Paul. “But there’s God behind it all. Mr. Savelli,” he said earnestly, after a slight pause, “you are twenty-eight; I am fifty-eight; so I’m more than old enough to be your father. You’ll forgive my taking up the attitude of the older man. I have lived a life such as your friends on the platform to-night–honorable, clean, sweet people–I’ve nothing to say against them–have no conception. I am English, of course–London born. My father was an Englishman; but my mother was a Sicilian. She used to go about with a barrel-organ–my father ran away with her. I have that violent South in my blood, and I’ve lived nearly all my days in London. I’ve had to pay dearly for my blood. The only compensation it has given me is a passion for art”–he waved his lean, bediamonded hand towards the horrific walls. “That is external–in a way–mere money has enabled me to gratify my tastes; but, as I was saying, I have lived a life of strange struggle, material, physical, and”–he brought down his free hand with a bang on the table–“it is only by the grace of God and the never-ceasing presence of Our Lord Jesus Christ by my side, that– that I am able to offer you my modest hospitality this evening.”

Paul felt greatly drawn to the man. He was beyond doubt sincere. He wore the air of one who had lived fiercely, who had suffered, who had conquered; but the air of one whose victory was barren, who was looking into the void for the things unconquerable yet essential to salvation. Paul made a little gesture of attention. He could find no words to reply. A man’s deep profession of faith is unanswerable.

“Ah,” said Barney Bill, “you ought to have come along o’ me, Silas, years ago in the old ‘bus. You mightn’t have got all these bright pictures, but you wouldn’t have had these ‘ere gloomy ideas. I don’t say as how I don’t hold with Gawd,” he explained, with uplifted forefinger and cocked head; “but if ever I thinks of Him, I like to feel that He’s in the wind or in the crickle-crackle of the earth, just near and friendly like, but not a-worrying of a chap, listening for every cuss-word as he uses to his old horse, and measuring every half-pint he pours down his dusty throat. No. That ain’t my idea of Gawd. But then I ain’t got religion.”

“Still the same old pagan,” laughed Paul.

“No, not the same, sonny,” said Barney Bill, holding up his knife, which supported a morsel of cheese. “Old. Rheumaticky. Got to live in a ‘ouse when it rains–me who never keered whether I was baked to a cinder or wet through! I ain’t a pagan no more. I’m a crock.”

Jane smiled affectionately at the old man, and her face was lit with rare sweetness when she smiled. “He really is just the same,” she said.

“He hasn’t changed much in forty years,” said Mr. Finn.

“I was a good Conservative then, as I am now,” said Bill. “That’s one thing, anyhow. So was you, Silas. But you had Radical leanings.”

Barney Bill’s remark set the talk on political lines. Paul learned that his host had sat for a year or more as a Progressive on the Hickney Heath Borough Council and aspired to a seat in Parliament.

“The Kingdom of Heaven,” said he, not unctuously or hypocritically, but in his grave tone of conviction, “is not adequately represented in the House.”

Paul pointed out that in the House of Lords one had the whole bench of Bishops.

“I’m not a member of the Established Church, Mr. Savelli,” replied Mr. Finn. “I’m a Dissenter–a Free Zion’st.”

“I’ve heard him conduc’ the service,” said Barney Bill. “He built the Meeting House close by, yer know. I goes sometimes to try and get converted. But I’m too old and stiff in the j’ints. No longer a pagan, but a crock, sonny. But I likes to listen to him. Gorbli– bless me, it’s a real bean feast–that’s what it is. He talks straight from the shoulder, he does, just as you talked to-night. Lets ’em ‘ave it bing-bang in the eye. Don’t he, Jane?”

“Bill means,” she explained, with the shadow of a smile, for Paul’s benefit, “that Mr. Finn is an eloquent preacher.”

“D’yer suppose he didn’t understand what I meant Y’ he exclaimed, setting down the beer glass which he was about to raise to his lips. “Him, what I discovered reading Sir Walter Scott with the cover off when he was a nipper with no clothes on? You understood, sonny.

“Of course I did.” He laughed gaily and turned to his host, who had suffered Barney Bill’s queer eulogy with melancholy indulgence. “One of these days I should like to come and hear you preach.”

“Any Sunday, at ten and six. You would be more than welcome.”

The meal was over. Barney Bill pulled a blackened clay pipe from his waistcoat pocket and a paper of tobacco.

“I’m a non-smoker,” said Mr. Finn to Paul, “and I’m sorry I’ve nothing to offer you–I see little company, so I don’t keep cigars in the house–but if you would care to smoke—” he waved a courteous and inviting hand.

Paul whipped out his cigarette case. It was of gold–a present last Christmas from the Winwood fitting part of the equipment of a Fortunate Youth. He opened it, offered a cigarette to Barney Bill.

“Garn!” said the old man. “I smokes terbakker,” and he filled his pipe with shag.

Mr. Finn rose from the table. “Will you excuse me, Mr. Savelli, if I leave you? I get up early to attend to my business. I must be at Billingsgate at half-past five to buy my fish. Besides, I have been preventing your talk with our friends. So pray don’t go. Good-night, Mr. Savelli.”

As he shook hands Paul met the sorrowful liquid eyes fixed on him with strange earnestness. “I must thank you for your charming hospitality. I hope you’ll allow me to come and see you again.”

“My house is yours.”

It was a phrase–a phrase of Castilian politeness–oddly out of place in the mouth of a Free Zionist purveyor of fried fish. But it seemed to have more than a Castilian, more than a Free Zionist significance. He was still pondering over it when Mr. Finn, having bidden Jane and Barney Bill good-night, disappeared.

“Ah!” said Barney Bill, lifting up the beer jug in order to refill his glass, and checked whimsically by the fact of its emptiness. “Ah,” said he, setting down the jug and limping round the table, “let us hear as how you’ve been getting on, sonny.”

They drew their chairs about the great. hearth, in which the idiotic little Viennese plaster animals sported in movement eternally arrested, and talked of the years that had passed. Paul explained once more his loss of Jane and his fruitless efforts to find her.

“We didn’t know,” said Jane. “We thought that either you were dead or had forgotten us–or had grown too big a man for us.”

“Axing your pardon,” said Barney Bill, taking his blackened clay from his lips and holding it between his gnarled fingers, “you said so. I didn’t. I always held that, if he wasn’t dead, the time would come when, as it was to-night, the three of us would be sitting round together. I maintained,” he added solemnly after a puff or two, “that his heart was in the right place. I’m a broken-down old crock, no longer a pagan; but I’m right. Ain’t I, sonny?” He thrust an arm into the ribs of Paul, who was sitting between them.

Paul looked at Jane. “I think this proves it.”

She returned his look steadily. “I own I was wrong. But a woman only proves herself to be right by always insisting that she is wrong.”

“My dear Jane,” cried Paul. “Since when have you become so psychological?”

“Gorblime,” said Barney Bill, “what in thunder’s that?”

“I know,” said Jane. “You”–to Paul–“were good enough to begin my education. I’ve tried since to go on with it.”

“It’s nothing to do with edication,” said Barney Bill. “It’s fac’s. Let’s have fac’s. Jane and I have been tramping the same old high-road, but you’ve been climbing mountains–yer and yer gold cigarette cases. Let’s hear about it.”

So Paul told his story, and as he told it, it seemed to him, in its improbability, more like a fairy-tale than the sober happenings of real life.

“You’ve said nothing about the princess,” Jane remarked, when he had ended.

“The princess?”

“Yes. Where does she come in?”

“The Princess Zobraska is a friend of my employers.”

“But you and she are great friends,” Jane persisted quietly. “That’s obvious to anybody. I was standing quite close when you helped her into the motor car.”

“I didn’t see you.”

“I took care you didn’t. She looks charming.”

“Most princesses are charming–when they’ve no particular reason to be otherwise,” said Paul. “It is their metier–their profession.”

There was a little silence. Jane, cheek on hand, looked thoughtfully into the fire. Barney Bill knocked’ the ashes out of his pipe and thrust it in his pocket. “It’s getting late, sonny.”

Paul looked at his watch. It was past one o’clock. He jumped up. “I hope to goodness you haven’t to begin work at half-past five,” he said to Jane.

“No. At eight.” She rose as he stretched out his hand. “You don’t know what it is to see you again, Paul. I can’t tell you. Some things are upsetting. But I’m glad. Oh, yes, I’m glad, Paul dear. Don’t think I’m not.”

Her voice broke a little. They were the first gentle words she had given him all the evening. Paul smiled and kissed her hand as he had kissed that of the princess, and, still holding it, said: “Don’t I know you of old? And if you suppose I haven’t thought of you and felt the need of you, you’re very much mistaken. Now I’ve found you, I’m not going to let you go again.”

She turned her head aside and looked down; there was the slightest movement of her plump shoulders. “What’s the good? I can’t do anything for you now, and you can’t do anything for me. You’re on the way to becoming a great man. To me, you’re a great man already. Don’t you see?”

“My dear, I was an embryonic Shelley, Raphael, Garrick, and Napoleon when you first met me,” he said jestingly.

“But then you didn’t belong to their–to their sphere. Now you do. Your friends are lords and ladies and–and princesses–”

“My friends,” cried Paul, “are people with great true hearts–like the Winwoods–and the princess, if you like–and you, and Barney Bill.”

“That’s a sentiment as does you credit,” said the old man. “Great true hearts! Now if you ain’t satisfied, my dear, you’re a damn criss-cross female. And yer ain’t, are yer?’ She laughed and Paul laughed. The little spell of intensity was broken. There were pleasant leave-takings.

“I’ll set you on your road a bit,” said Barney Bill. “I live in the neighbourhood. Good-bye, Jane.”

She went with them to the front door, and stood in the gusty air watching them until they melted into the darkness.

CHAPTER XIV

BETWEEN the young man of immaculate vesture, of impeccable manners, of undeniable culture, of instinctive sympathy with the great world where great things are done, of unerring tact, of mythological beauty and charm, of boundless ambition, of resistless energy, of incalculable promise, in outer semblance and in avowed creed the fine flower of aristocratic England, professing the divine right of the House of Lords and the utilitarian sanctity of the Church of England–between Paul, that is to say, and the Radical, progressive councillor of Hickney Heath, the Free Zionist dissenter (not even Congregationalist or Baptist or Wesleyan, or any powerfully organized Non-conformist whose conscience archbishops consult with astute patronage), the purveyor of fried fish, the man of crude, uncultivated taste, there should have been a gulf fixed as wide as the Pacific Ocean. As a matter of fact, whatever gulf lay between them was narrow enough to be bridged comfortably over by mutual esteem. Paul took to visiting Mr. Finn. Accustomed to the somewhat tired or conventional creeds of his political world, he found refreshment in the man’s intense faith. He also found pathetic attraction in the man’s efforts towards self-expression. Mr. Finn, who lived a life of great loneliness–scarcely a soul, said Jane, crossed his threshold from month’s end to month’s end–seemed delighted to have a sympathetic visitor to whom he could display his painted treasures. When he was among them the haunting pain vanished from his eyes, as sometimes one has seen it vanish from those of an unhappy woman among her flowers. He loved to take Paul through his collection and point out the beauties and claim his admiration. He had converted a conservatory running along one side of the house into a picture gallery, and this was filled with his masterpieces of pictorial villainy. Here Paul was at first astonished at recognizing replicas of pictures which hung in other rooms. Mr. Finn explained.

“These,” said he, “are the originals.”

Paul pondered over the dark saying for a moment or two until he came upon a half-finished canvas on an easel. It was the copy of a landscape on the wall. He turned questioningly to his host. The latter smiled.

“I’m a bit of an artist myself,” he said. “But as I’ve never had time for lessons in painting, I teach myself by copying good pictures. It’s a Saunders”–a name unknown to Paul–“and a very good example. It’s called Noontide. The cow is particularly good, isn’t it? But it’s exceedingly difficult. That fore-shortening–I can’t get it quite right yet. But I go on and on till I succeed. The only way.”

Paul acquiesced and asked him where he had picked up his Saunders. Indeed, where had he picked up all the others? Not an exhibition in London would have admitted one of them. This “Saunders” represented a wooden cow out of drawing lying in the shade of a conventional tree. It was peculiarly bad.

“I bought it direct from the artist,” replied Mr. Finn. “He’s an unrecognized genius, and now he’s getting old, poor fellow. Years ago he offended the Royal Academy, and they never forgot it. He says they’ve kept him under all his life. I have a great many of his pictures.” He looked admiringly at the cow for a while, and added: “I gave him four pounds ten for this one.”

Paul could not forbear saying, though his tone betrayed no irony: “A good price.”

“I think so,” replied Mr. Finn. “That’s what he asked. I could never haggle with an artist. His work is of the spirit, isn’t it?”

And Paul marvelled at the childlike simplicity of the man, the son of the Sicilian woman who went about with a barrel-organ, who, starting in the race on a level with Barney Bill, had made a fortune in the exploitation of fried fish. To disturb his faith in the genius of Saunders were a crime–as base a crime as proving to a child the non-existence of fairies. For Paul saw that Silas Finn found in this land of artistic illusion a refuge from many things; not only from the sordid cares of a large business, but perhaps also from the fierce intensity of his religion, from his driving and compelling deity. Here God entered gently.

There was another reason, which Paul scarcely confessed to himself, for the pleasure he found in the older man’s company. The veil which he had thrown so adroitly over his past history, which needed continuous adroitness to maintain, was useless in this house. Both Barney Bill and Jane had spoken of him freely. Silas Finn knew of Bludston, of his modeldom, of his inglorious career on the stage. He could talk openly once more, without the never-absent subconscious sense of reserve. He was still, in his own, eyes, the prince out of the fairy-tale; but Silas Finn and the two others alone of his friends shared the knowledge of the days when he herded swine. Now a prince out of a fairy-tale who has herded swine is a romantic figure. Paul did not doubt that he was one. Even Jane, in spite of her direct common sense, admitted it. Barney Bill proclaimed it openly, slapping him on the back and taking much credit to himself for helping the prince on the way to his kingdom. And Mr. Finn, even in the heat of political discussion or theological asseveration, treated him with a curious and pathetic deference.

Meanwhile Paul pursued his own career of glory. The occasional visits to Hickney Heath were, after all, but rare, though distinct, episodes in his busy life. He had his parliamentary work for Colonel Winwood, his work for Miss Winwood, his work for the Young England League. He had his social engagements. He had the Princess Zobraska. He also began to write, in picturesque advocacy of his views, for serious weekly and monthly publications. Then Christmas came and lie found himself at Drane’s Court, somewhat gasping for breath. A large houseparty, however, including Lord Francis Ayres, the chief Opposition Whip, threatened to keep him busy.

The Princess drove over from Chetwood Park for dinner on Christmas Day. He had to worship from afar; for a long spell of the evening to worship with horrible jealousy. Lord Francis Ayres, a bachelor and a man of winning charm, as men must be whose function it is to keep Members of Parliament good and pleased with themselves and sheeplike, held the Princess captive, in a remote corner, with his honeyed tongue. She looked at him seductively out of her great, slumberous blue eyes, even as she had looked, on occasion, at him, Paul. He hated Lord Francis, set himself up against him, as of old he had set himself up against Billy Goodge. He was a better man than Frank Ayres. Frank Ayres was only a popinjay. Beneath the tails of his coat he snapped his fingers at Frank Ayres, while he listened, with his own agreeable smile, to Mademoiselle de Cressy’s devilled gossip.

He was very frigid and courtly when he bade the Princess good night at the door of her limousine.

“Ah, que vous etes bete!” she laughed.

He went to bed very angry. She had told him to his face that he was a silly fool. And so he was. He thought of all the brilliantly dignified things he might have said, if the relentless engine had not whirred her away down the drive. But the next morning Lord Francis met him in the wintry garden and smiled and held out a winning hand. Paul hid his hatred beneath the mask of courtesy. They talked for a few moments of indifferent matters. Then Frank Ayres suddenly said: “Have you ever thought of standing for Parliament?”

Paul, who had been sauntering between flowerless beds with his companion, stood stock still. The Chief Whip of a political party is a devil of a fellow. To the aspiring young politician he is much more a devil of a fellow than the Prime Minister or any Secretary of State. If a Chief Whip breathes the suggestion that a man might possibly stand for election as a Member of Parliament, it means that at any suitable vacancy, or at a general election, be will, with utter certainty, have his chance as a candidate with the whole force of his party behind him. It is part of the business of Chief Whips to find candidates.

“Of course,” said Paul, rather stupidly. “Eventually. One of these days.”

“But soon?”

“Soon?”

Paul’s head reeled. What did he mean by soon? “Well,” Lord Francis laughed, “not to-morrow. But pretty soon. Look here, Savelli. I’m going to speak frankly. The party’s in for a long period out of office. That’s obvious. Look at the majority against us. We want the young blood–not the old hacks–so that when we come in again we shall have a band of trained men in the heyday of their powers. Of course I know–it’s my business to know–what generally you have done for the Young England League, but I missed your speech at Flickney Heath in the autumn. You had an immense success, hadn’t you?”

“They seemed pleased with what I had to say,” replied Paul modestly. “When did you hear about it?”

“Last night.”

“The Winwoods are the dearest people in the world,” said Paul, walking warily, “but they are prejudiced in my favour.”

“It wasn’t the Winwoods.”

The beautiful truth flashed upon Paul.

“Then it was the Princess Zobraska.”

The other laughed. “Never mind. I know all about it. It isn’t often one has to listen to speeches at second-hand. The question is: Would you care to stand when the time comes?”

“I should just think I would,” cried Paul boyishly.

All his jealous resentment had given place to exultation. It was the Princess who had told Frank Ayres. If she had been laying him under the spell of her seduction it was on his, Paul’s, account. She had had the splendid audacity to recite his speech to the Chief Whip. Frank Ayres was suddenly transformed from a popinjay into an admirable fellow. The Princess herself sat enthroned more adorable than ever.

“The only difficulty,” said Paul, “is that I have to earn my living.”

“That might be arranged,” said Lord Francis.

So Paul, as soon as he found an opportunity, danced over to Chetwood Park and told his Princess all about it, and called her a tutelary goddess and an angel and all manner of pretty names. And the Princess, who was alone, poured for him her priceless Russian tea into egg-shell China tea-cups and fed him on English crumpets, and, in her French and feminine way, gave him the outer fringe of her heart to play with–a very dangerous game. She had received him, not as once before in the state drawing room, but in the intimacy of her own boudoir, a place all soft lights and cushions and tapestries and gleaming bits of sculpture. After tea and crumpets had been consumed, the dangerous game proceeded far enough for Paul to confess his unjust dislike of Frank Ayres.

“Gros jaloux,” said the Princess.

“That was why you said que vous etes bete,” said he.

“Partly.”

“What were the other reasons?”

“Any woman has a thousand reasons for calling any man stupid.”

“Tell me some of them at any rate.”

“Well, isn’t it stupid of a man to try to quarrel with his best friend when he won’t be seeing her again for three or four months?”

“You’re not going away soon?”

“Next week.”

“Ohl” said Paul.

“Yes. I go to Paris, then to my villa at Mont Boron. I have the nostalgia of my own country, you see. Then to Venice at Easter.”

I Paul looked at her wistfully, for life seemed suddenly very blank and dismal. “What shall I do all that time without my best friend?”

“You will probably find another and forget her.”

She was lying back among cushions, pink and terra-cotta, and a round black cushion framed her delicate head.

Paul said in a low voice, bending forward: “Do you think you are a woman whom men forget?”

Their eyes met. The game had grown very perilous. “Men may remember the princess,” she replied, “but forget the woman.”

“If it weren’t for the woman inside the princess; what reason should I have for remembering?” he asked.

She fenced. “But, as it is, you don’t see me very often.”

“I know. But you are here–to be seen–not when I want you, for that would be every hour of the day–but, at least, in times of emergency. You are here, all the same, in the atmosphere of my life.”

“And if I go abroad I shall no longer be in that atmosphere? Did I not say you would forget?”

She laughed. Then quickly started forward, and, elbow on knee and chin on palm, regarded him brightly. “We are talking like a couple of people out of Mademoiselle de Scudery,” she said before he had time to reply. “And we are in the twentieth century, mon pauvre ami. We must be sensible. I know that you will miss me. And I will miss you too. Mais que voulez-vous? We have to obey the laws of the world we live in.”

“Need we?” asked Paul daringly. “Why need we?”

“We must. I must go away to my own country. You must stay in yours and work and fulfill your ambitions.” She paused. “I want you to be a great man,” she said, with a strange tenderness in her voice.

“With you by my side,” said he, “I feel I could conquer the earth.”

“As your good friend I shall always be by your side. Vous voyez, mon cher Paul,” she went on quickly in French. “I am not quite as people see me. I am a woman who is lonely and not too happy, who has had disillusions which have embittered her life. You know my history. It is public property. But I am young. And my heart is healed–and it craves faith and tenderness and–and friendship. I have many to flatter me. I am not too ugly. Many men pay their court to me, but they do not touch my heart. None of them even interest me. I don’t know why. And then I have my rank, which imposes on me its obligations. Sometimes I wish I were a little woman of nothing at all, so that I could do as I like. Mais enfin, I do what I can. You have come, Paul Savelli, with your youth and your faith and your genius, and you pay your court to me like the others. Yes, it is true–and as long as it was amusing, I let it go on. But now that you interest me, it is different. I want your success. I want it with all my heart. It is a little something in my life–I confess it–quelque chose de tres joli–and I will not spoil it. So let us be good friends, frank and loyal–without any Scudery.” She looked at him with eyes that had lost their languor–a sweet woman’s eyes, a little moist, very true. “And now,” she said, “will you be so kind as to put a log on the fire.”

Paul rose and threw a log on the glowing embers, and stood by her side. He was deeply moved. Never before had she so spoken. Never before had she afforded a glimpse of the real woman. Her phrases, so natural, so sincere, in her own tongue, and so caressive, stirred the best in him. The glamour passed from the royal lady; only the sweet and beautiful woman remained.

“I will be what you will, my Princess,” he said.

At that moment he could not say more. For the first time in his life he was mute in a woman’s presence; and the reason was that for the first time in his life love for a woman had gripped his heart.

She rose and smiled at him. “Bons amis, francs et loyaux?”

“Francs et loyaux.”

She gave him her hand in friendship; but she gave him her eyes in love. It is the foolish way of women.

“May a frank and loyal friend write to you sometimes?” he asked.

“Why, yes. And a frank and loyal friend will answer.”

“And when shall I see you again?”

“Did I not tell you,” she said, moving to the bell, for this was leave-taking–“that I shall be in Venice at Easter?”

Paul went out into the frosty air, and the bright wintry stars shone down on him. Often on such nights he had looked up, wondering which was his star, the star that guided his destiny. But to-night no such fancy crossed his mind. He did not think of the stars. He did not think of his destiny. His mind and soul were drenched in thought of one woman. It had come at last, the great passion, the infinite desire. It had come in a moment, wakened into quivering being by the caressive notes of the dear French voice–“mais je suis jeune, et mon coeur est gueri, et il lui manque affreusement de la foi, de la tendresse, de–de”–adorable catch of emotion–“de l’amitie.” Friendship, indeed! For amitie all but her lips said amour. He walked beneath the wintry stars, a man in a perfect dream.

Till then she had been but his Princess, the exquisite lady whom it had amused to wander with him into the pays du tendre. She had been as far above him as the now disregarded stars. She had come down with a carnival domino over her sidereal raiment, and had met him on carnival equality. He beau masque! He, knowing her, had fallen beneath her starry spell. He was Paul Kegworthy, Paul Savelli, what you like; Paul the adventurer, Paul the man born to great things. She was a beautiful woman, bearing the title of Princess, the title that had haunted his life since first the Vision Splendid dawned upon him as he lay on his stomach eavesdropping and heard the words of the divinely-smelling goddess who had given him his talisman, the cornelian heart. To “rank himself with princes” had been the intense meaning of his life since ragged and fiercely imaginative childhood. Odd circumstances had ranked him with Sophie Zobraska. The mere romance of it had carried him off his feet. She was a princess. She was charming. She frankly liked his society. She seemed interested in his adventurous career. She was romantic. He too. She was his Egeria. He had worshipped her romantically, in a mediaeval, Italian way, and she had accepted the homage. It had all been deliciously artificial. It had all been Mademoiselle de Scudery. But to-day the real woman, casting off her carnival domino, casting off too the sidereal raiment, had spoken, for the first time, in simple womanhood, and her betraying eyes had told things that they had told to no other man living or dead. And all that was artificial, all that was fantastic, all that was glamour, was stripped away from Paul in the instant of her self-revelation. He loved her as man loves woman. He laughed aloud as his young feet struck the frozen road. She knew and was not angry. She, in her wonder, gave him leave to love her. It was obvious that she loved him to love her. Dear God! He could go on loving her like this for the rest of his life. What more did he want? To the clean man of nine-and-twenty, sufficient for the day is the beauty thereof.

An inspired youth took his place at the Winwoods’ dinner table that evening. The elderly, ugly heiress, Miss Durning, concerning whom Miss Winwood had, with gentle malice, twitted him some months before, sat by his side. He sang her songs of Araby and tales of far Cashmere–places which in the commonplace way of travel he had never visited. What really happened in the drawing room between the departure of the ladies and the entrance of the men no one knows. But before the ladies went to bed Miss Winwood took Paul aside.

“Paul dear,” she said, “you’re never going to marry an old woman for money, are you?”

“Good God, no! Dearest lady, what do you mean?”

His cry was so sincere that she laughed.

“Nothing,” she said.

“But you must mean something.” He threw out his hands.

“Are you aware that you’ve been flirting disgracefully with Lizzle Durning?”

“I?” said Paul, clapping a hand to his shirt-front.

“You.”

He smiled his sunny smile into the clear, direct eyes of his dearest lady–all the more dear because of the premature white of her hair. “I would flirt to-night with Xantippe, or Kerenhappuch, or Queen Victoria,” said he.

“Why?”

He laughed, and although none of the standing and lingering company had overheard them, he gently led her to the curtained embrasure of the drawing-room window.

“This is perhaps the biggest day of my life. I’ve not had an opportunity of telling you. This morning Frank Ayres offered me a seat in Parliament.”

“I’m glad,” said Ursula Winwood; but her eyes hardened. “And so– Lizzie Durning–”

He took both her elbows in his hands–only a Fortunate Youth, with his laughing charm, would have dared to grip Ursula Winwood’s elbows and cut her short. “Dearest lady,” said he, “to-day there are but two women in the world for me. You are one. The other–well–it isn’t Miss Durning.”

She searched him through and through, “This afternoon?”

“Yes.”

“Paul!” She withdrew from his grasp. In her voice was a touch of reproach.

“Dearest lady,” said he, “I would die rather than marry a rich woman, ugly or beautiful, if I could not bring her something big in return–something worth living for.”

“You’ve fold me either too much or too little. Am I not entitled to know how things stand?”

“You’re entitled to know the innermost secrets of my heart,” he cried; and he told thereof as far as his love for the Princess was concerned.

“But, my poor boy,” said Ursula tenderly, “how is it all going to end?”

“It’s never going to end,” cried Paul.

Ursula Winwood smiled on him and sighed a little; for she remembered the gallant young fellow who had been killed in the Soudan in eighteen eighty-five.

CHAPTER XV

IT would never end. Why should it? Could a Great Wonder be merely a transient thrill? Absurd. Dawn followed night, day after day, and the wonder had not faded. It would never fade. Letter followed letter, each more precious than the last.

She began with “Mon cher Paul.” Then “Mon cher,” then sometimes “Paul.” She set the tone of the frank and loyal friendship in a style very graceful, very elusive, a word of tenderness melting away in a laugh; she took the friendship, pulled it to pieces and reconstructed it in ideal form; then she tied blue ribbon round its neck, and showed him how beautiful it was. She sat on the veranda of her villa and looked’ out on the moonlit Mediterranean and wanted to cry–“J’avais enbie de Pleurer”–because she was all alone, having entertained at dinner a heap of dull and ugly people. She had spent a day on the yacht of a Russiarr Grand-Duke. “Il m’a fait une cour effrenee”–Paul thirsted immediately for the blood of this Grand-Duke, who had dared to make violent love to her. But when, a few lines farther on, he found that she had guessed his jealousy and laughed at it, he laughed too. “Don’t be afraid. I have had enough of these people.” She wanted une ame sincere et candide; and Paul laid the flattering unction to his own sincere and candid soul. Then she spoke prettily of his career. He was to be the flambeau eveilleur, the awakening torch in the darkness before the daybreak. But he musn’t overwork. His health was precious. There was a blot and erasure in the sentence. He took the letter to the light, lover-wise, and looked at it through a magnifying glass–and his pulses thrilled when it told him that she had originally written, “Votre sante m’est precieuse,” and had scrabbled out the “m.” “Your health is precious to me.” That is what her heart had said. Did lover ever have a dearer mistress? He kissed the blot, and the thick French ink coming off on his lips was nectar.

And he began his letters with “My dear Princess;” then it was “Dearest Princess;” then “My Princess.” Then she rallied him on the matter. It came to “Mais enfin j’ai un petit nom comme tout le monde.” In common with the rest of humanity she had a Christian name–and she was accustomed to be called by it by her frank and loyal friends. “And they are so few.” Paul heard the delicate little sigh and saw the delicate rise and fall of the white bosom. And again he fed on purple ink. So he began his next letter with “Dear Sophie.” But he could not pour the same emotion into “Dear Sophie” as he could into “My Princess”–and “My Sophie” was a step beyond the bounds of frank and loyal friendship. So it came to his apostrophizing her as “Dear” and scattering “Sophies” deliciously through the text. And so the frank and loyal friendship went on its appointed course, as every frank and loyal friendship between two young and ardent souls who love each other has proceeded since the beginning of a sophisticated world.

The first three months of that year were a period of enchantment. He lived supremely. The daily round of work was trivial play. He rose at seven, went to bed at two, crowded the nineteen hours of wakefulness with glorious endeavour. He went all over the country with his flambeau eveilleur, awakening the Youth of England, finding at last the great artistic gift the gods had given him, the gift of oratory. One day he reminded Jane of a talk long ago when he had fled from the studios: “You asked me how I was going to earn my living. I said I was going to follow one of the Arts.”

“I remember,” said Jane, regarding him full-eyed. “You said you thought you were a poet–but you might be a musician or painter. Finally you decided you were an actor.”

He laughed his gay laugh. “I was an infernally bad actor,” he acknowledged.

Then he explained his failure on the stage. He was impatient of other people’s inventions, wanting to play not Hamlet or Tom or Dick or Romeo or Harry, but himself. Now he could play himself. It was acting in a way. Anyhow it was an Art; so his boyish prophecy had come true. He had been struggling from childhood for a means of self-expression. He had tried most of them save this. Here he had found it. He loved to play upon a crowd as if they were so many notes of a vast organ.

On this occasion Jane said: “And my means of self-expression is to play on the keys of a typewriter.”

“Your time hasn’t come,” he replied. “When you have found your means you will express yourself all the more greatly.”

Which was ingenious on the part of Paul, but ironically consoling to Jane.

One week-end during the session he spent at the Marchioness of Chudley’s place in Lancashire. He drove in a luxurious automobile through the stately park, which once he had traversed in the brakeful of urchins, the raggedest of them all, and his heart swelled with pardonable exultation. He had passed through Bludston and he had caught a glimpse of what had once been his brickfield, now the site of more rows of mean little houses, and he had seen the grim factory chimneys still smoking, smoking. . . . The little Buttons, having grown up into big Buttons, were toiling away their lives in those factories. And Button himself, the unspeakable Button? Was he yet alive? And Mrs. Button, who had been Polly Kegworthy and called herself his mother? It was astonishing how seldom he thought of her. . . . He had run away a scarecrow boy in a gipsy van. He came back a formative force in the land, the lover of a princess, the honoured guest of the great palace of the countryside. He slipped his hand into his waistcoat pocket and felt the cornelian heart.

Yes, in the great palace he found himself an honoured guest. His name was known independently of his work for the Winwoods. He was doing good service to his party. The word had gone abroad–perhaps Frank Ayres had kindly spoken it–that he was the coming man. Lady Chudley said: “I wonder if you remember what we talked about when I first met you.”

Paul laughed, for she did not refer to the first meeting of all. “I’m afraid I was very young and fatuous,” said he. “It was years ago. I hadn’t grown up.”

“Never mind. We talked about waking the country from its sleep.”

“And you gave me a phrase, Lady Chudley–‘the Awakener of England.’ It stuck. It crystallized all sorts of vague ambitions. I’ve never forgotten it for five consecutive minutes. But how can you remember a casual act of graciousness to an unimportant boy?”

“No boy who dreams of England’s greatness is unimportant,” she said. “You’ve proved me to be right. Your dreams are coming true–see, I don’t forget!”

“I owe you far more than you could possibly imagine,” said Paul.

“No, no. Don’t. Don’t exaggerate. A laughing phrase–that’s nothing.”

“It is something. Even a great deal. But it’s not all,” said he.

“What else is there?”

“You were one of the two or three,” he said earnestly, thinking of the Bludston factory, “who opened new horizons for me.”

“I’m a proud woman,” said Lady Chudley.

The next day, Sunday, old Lord Chudley dragged him into his own private den. He had a very red, battered, clean-shaven face and very red hair and side whiskers; and he was a very honest gentleman, believing implicitly in God and the King and the House of Lords, and Foxes, and the Dutch School of Painting, and his responsibility as a great landowner toward the two or three thousand human beings with whom he had business relations.

“Look here, Savelli. I’ve looked into your League. It’s a damned good thing. About the only thing that has been invented which can stem the tide of Socialism. Catch ’em young. That’s the way. But you want the sinews of war. You get subscriptions, but not enough; I’ve seen your last balance sheet. You want a little army of–what the devil shall we call ’em?”

“Big Englanders,” Paul suggested at a venture.

“Good. We want an army of ’em to devote their whole time to the work. Open a special fund. You and Ursula Winwood will know how to work it. What Ursula Winwood doesn’t know in this sort of business isn’t worth knowing–and here’s something to head the list with.”

And he handed Paul a cheque, which after a dazed second or two he realized to be one for five thousand pounds.

That was the beginning of the financial prosperity and the real political importance of the Young England League. Paul organized a great public dinner with the Leader of the Opposition in the chair and an amazing band of notables around the tables. Speeches were made, the Marquis of Chudley’s patriotism extolled, and subscription lists filled up and handed to a triumphant organizing secretary.

A powerful daily newspaper took up the cause and made strong appeal. The Lodges made simultaneous efforts in their respective districts. Money flowed into the League’s coffers.

When Parliament rose for the Easter recess Paul, the most tired, yet the most blissful, youth among the Fortunate, flew straight to Venice, where a happy-eyed princess welcomed him. She was living in a Palazzo on the Grand Canal, lent to her–that is the graceful Italian way of putting it–by some Venetian friends; and there, with Mademoiselle de Cressy to keep off the importunate, she received such acquaintance as floated from the ends of the earth through the enchanted city.

“I have started by seeing as few people as I can,” she said. “That’s all on account of you, monsieur.”

He pressed her hand. “I hope we don’t see a single soul we know as long as I’m here,” he declared.

His hope was gratified, not completely, but enough to remove grounds for lover’s fretfulness. He passed idyllic days in halcyon weather. Often she would send her gondola to fetch him from the Grand Hotel, where he was staying. Now and then, most graciously audacious of princesses, she would come herself. On such occasions he would sit awaiting her with beating heart, juvenis fortunatus nimium, on the narrow veranda of the hotel, regardless of the domed white pile of Santa Maria della Salute opposite, or the ceaseless life on the water, or the sunshine, or anything else in Venice, his gaze fixed on the bend of the canal; and then at last would appear the tall curved prow, and then the white-clad, red-sashed Giacomo bending to his oar, and then the white tenda with the dear form beneath, vaguely visible, and then Felipe, clad like Giacomo and bending, too, rhythmically with the foremost figure. Slowly, all too slowly, the gondola would near the steps, and beneath the tenda would smile the dearest face in the world, and the cheeks would be delicately flushed and the eyes tender and somewhat shy. And Paul would stand, smiling too, a conquering young figure with green Marienbad hat tilted with ever so tiny a shade of jauntiness, the object of frankly admiring and curious glances from a lone woman or two on the veranda, until the gondola was brought up to the wave-washed steps, and the hotel porter had fixed the bridge of plank. Then, with Giacomo supporting his elbow, he would board the black craft and would creep under the tenda and sink on the low seat by her side with a sense of daring and delicious intimacy, and the gondola would glide away into fairyland.

“Let us be real tourists and do Venice thoroughly,” she had said. “I have never seen it properly.”

“But you’ve been here many times before.”

“Yes. But–”

She hesitated.

“Eh bien?”

“Je ne peux pas le dire. Il faut deviner.”

“Will you forgive me if I guess right? Our great Shakespeare says: ‘Love lends a precious seeing to the eye.'”

“That–that’s very pretty,” said the Princess in French. “I love much your Shakespeare.”

Whereupon Paul recognized her admission of the correctness of his conjecture; and so, with the precious vision they had borrowed, they went about tourist-wise to familiar churches and palaces, and everything they saw was lit with exceeding loveliness. And they saw the great pictures of the world, and Paul, with his expert knowledge, pointed out beauties she had not dreamed of hitherto, and told her tales of the painters and discoursed picturesquely on Venetian history, and she marvelled at his insight and learning and thought him the most wonderful man that had ever dropped, ready-made, from heaven. And he, in the flush of his new love, was thrilled by her touch and the low tones of her voice when she plucked him by the sleeve and murmured: “Ah, Paul, regardez-moi ca. It is so beautiful one wants to weep with joy.”

They spoke now half in French, half in English, and she no longer protested against his murderous accent, which, however, lie strove to improve. Love must have lent its precious hearing too, for she vowed she loved to hear him speak her language.

In the great Council Chamber of the Ducal Palace they looked at the seventy-six portraits of the illustrious succession of Doges–with the one tragic vacant space, the missing portrait of Marino Faliero, the Rienzi of Venice, the man before his time.

“It seizes one’s heart, doesn’t it?” said the Princess, with her impulsive touch on his sleeve. “All these men were kings– sovereigns of a mighty nation. And how like they are to one another–in this essential quality one would say they were brothers of a great family.”

“Why, yes,” he cried, scanning the rows of severe and subtle faces. “It’s true. Illuminatingly true.”

He slid up his wrist quickly so that his hand met hers; he held it. “How swift your perception is! And what is that quality–that quality common to them all–that quality of leadership? Let us try to find it.”

Unconsciously he gripped her hand, and she returned his pressure; and they stood, as chance willed it, alone, free from circumambulant tourists, in the vast chamber, vivid with Paul Veronese’s colour on wall and ceilings, with Tintoretto and Bassano’ with the arrogant splendour of the battles and the pomp and circumstance of victorious armies of the proud and conquering republic, and their eyes were drawn from all this painted and riotous wonder by the long arresting frieze of portraits of serene, masterful and subtle faces.

“The common factor–that’s what we want, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she breathed.

And as they stood, hand in hand, the unspoken thought vibrating between them, the memory came to him of a day long ago when he had stood with another woman–a girl then–before the photographs in the window of the London Stereoscopic Company in Regent Street, and he had scanned faces of successful men. He laughed–he could not help it–and drew his Princess closer to him. Between the analogous then and the wonderful now, how immense a difference! As he laughed she looked swiftly up into his face.

“I know why you laugh.”

“No, my Princess. Impossible.”

“Mais oui. Tell me. All these great princes”–she swept her little gloved hand toward the frieze. “What is their common factor?”

Paul, forgetful of his mirth, looked round. “‘Indomitable will,” said be seriously. “Unconquerable ambition, illimitable faith. They all seem to be saying their creed. ‘I believe in myself almighty, and in Venice under my control, and in God who made us both, and in the inferiority of the remnant of the habitable globe.’ Or else: ‘In the beginning God created Venice. Then He created the rest of the world. Then He created Me. Then He retired and left me to deal with the situation.’ Or else: ‘I am an earthly Trinity. I am myself. I am Venice. I am God.'”

“It is magnificent!” she cried. “How you understand them! How you understand the true aristocratic spirit! They are all, what you call, leaders of men. I did not expect an analysis so swift and so true. But, Paul”–her voice sank adorably–“all these men lack something–something that you have. And that is why I thought you laughed.”

He smiled down on her. “Do you think I was measuring myself with these men?”

“Naturally. Why should you not?” she asked proudly.

“And what have I got that they lack?”

“Happiness,” said the Princess.

Paul was silent for a while, as they moved slowly away to the balcony which overlooks the lagoon and San Giorgio Maggiore glowing warm in the sunshine, and then he said: “Yet most of those men loved passionately in their time, and were loved by beautiful women.”

“Their love was a thing of the passions, not of the spirit. You cannot see a woman, that is to say happiness, behind any of their faces.”

He whispered: “Can you see a woman behind mine.”

“If you look like that,” she replied, with a contented little laugh, “the whole world can see it.” And so their talk drifted far away from Doges, just as their souls were drifting far from the Golden Calf of the Frank and Loyal Friendship which Sophie the Princess had set up.

How could they help it–and in Venice of all places in the world? If she had determined on maintaining the friendship calm and austere, why in Minerva’s name had she bidden him hither? Sophie Zobraska passed for a woman of sense. None knew better than she the perils of moonlit canals and the sensuous splash of water against a gondola, and the sad and dreamy beauty which sets the lonely heart aching for love. Why had she done it? Some such questions must Mademoiselle de Cressy have asked, for the Princess told him that Stephanie had lectured her severely for going about so much in public alone with a beau jeune homme.

“But we don’t always want Stephanie with us,” she argued, “and she is not sympathetic in Venice. She likes restaurants and people. Besides, she is always with her friends at Danielli’s, so if it weren’t for you I should be doing nothing all by myself in the lonely palazzo. Forcement we go about together.”

Which was all sophistical and nonsensical; and she knew it, for there was a mischievous little gleam in her eye as she spoke. But none the less, shutting her ears to the unsympathetic Stephanie, did she continue to show herself alone in public with the beautiful youth. She had thrown her crown over the windmills for a few happy days; for a few happy days she was feeding her starved nature, drinking in her fill of beauty and colour and the joy of life. And the pair, thus forcibly thrown together, drifted through the narrow canals beneath the old crumbling palaces, side by side, and hand in hand while Giacomo and Felipe, disregarded automata, bent to their oars.

One afternoon, one mellow and memorable afternoon, they were returning from Murano. Not a breath of wind ruffled the lagoon. The islands in their spring verdure slumbered peacefully. Far away the shipping in the bacino lay still like enchanted craft. Only a steamer or two, and here and there the black line of a gondola with its standing, solitary rower, broke the immobility of things. And Venice, russet and rose and grey, brooded in the sunset, a city of dreams. They murmured words of wonder and regret. Instinctively they drew near and their shoulders touched. Their clasp of fingers tightened and their breath came quickly, and for a long time they were silent. Then at last he whispered her name, in the old foolish and inevitable way. And she turned her face to him, and met his eyes and said “Paul,” and her lips as she said it seemed to speak a kiss. And all the earth was wrapped in glory too overwhelming for speech.

It was only when they entered the Grand Canal and drew up by the striped posts of the palazzo that she said: “I have those Roman people and the Heatherfields coming to dinner. I wish I hadn’t.” She sighed. “Would you care to come?”

He smiled into her eyes. “No, my Princess, not to-night. I should do silly things. To-night I will go and talk to the moon. To-morrow, when can I come?”

“Early. As early as you like.”

And Paul went away and talked to the moon, and the next morning, his heart tumultuous, presented himself at the palazzo. He was shown into the stiff Italian drawing-room, with its great Venetian glass chandelier, its heavy picture-hung walls, its Empire furniture covered in yellow silk. Presently the door opened and she entered, girlish in blouse and skirt, fresh as the morning. “Bon jour, Paul. I’ve not had time to put on my hat, but–”

She did not end, for he strode toward her and with a little laugh of triumph took her in his arms and kissed her. And so what had to be came to pass.

CHAPTER XVI

I LOVE you too much, my Sophie, to be called the Princess Zobraska’s husband.”

“And I love you too much, dear, to wish to be called anything else than Paul Savelli’s wife.”

That was their position, perfectly defined, perfectly understood. They had arrived at it after many arguments and kisses and lovers’ protestations.

“Such as I am I am,” cried Paul. “A waif and stray, an unknown figure coming out of the darkness. I have nothing to give you but my love.”

“Are there titles or riches on earth of equal value?”

“But I must give you more. The name Paul Savelli itself must be a title of honour.”

“It is becoming that,” said the Princess. “And we can wait a little, Paul, can’t we? We are so happy like this. Ah!” she sighed. “I have never been so happy in my life.”

“Nor I,” said Paul.

“And am I really the first?”

“The first. Believe it or not as you like. But it’s a fact. I’ve told you my life’s dream. I never sank below it; and that is why perhaps it has come true.”

For once the assertion was not the eternal lie. Paul came fresh-hearted to his Princess.

“I wish I were a young girl, Paul.”

“You are a star turned woman. The Star of my Destiny in which I always believed. The great things will soon come.”

They descended to more commonplace themes. Until the great things came, what should be their mutual attitude before Society?

“Until I can claim you, let it be our dear and beautiful secret,” said Paul. “I would not have it vulgarized by the chattering world for anything in life.”

Then Paul proved himself to be a proud and delicate lover, and when London with its season and its duties and its pleasures absorbed them, he had his reward. For it was sweet to see her in great assemblies, shining like a queen and like a queen surrounded by homage, and to know that he alone of mortals was enthroned in her heart. It was sweet to meet her laughing glance, dear fellow-conspirator. It was sweet every morning and night to have the intimate little talk through the telephone. And it was sweetest of all to snatch a precious hour with her alone. Of such vain and foolish things is made all that is most beautiful in life.

He took his dearest lady–though Miss Winwood, now disclaimed the title–into his confidence. So did the Princess. It was very comforting to range Miss Winwood on their side; and to feel themselves in close touch with her wisdom and sympathy. And her sympathy manifested itself in practical ways–those of the woman confidante of every love affair since the world began. Why should the Princess Zobraska not interest herself in some of the philanthropic schemes of which the house in Portland Place was the headquarters? There was one, a Forlorn Widows’ Fund, the presidency of which she would be willing to resign in favour of the Princess. The work was trivial: it consisted chiefly in consultation with Mr. Savelli and in signing letters. The Princess threw her arms round her neck, laughing and blushing and calling her delicieuse. You see it was obvious that Mr. Savelli could not be consulted in his official capacity or official letters signed elsewhere than in official precincts.

“I’ll do what I can for the pair of you,” said Miss Winwood to Paul. “But it’s the most delightfully mad and impossible thing I’ve ever put my hand to.”

Accepting the fact of their romance, however, she could not but approve Paul’s attitude. It was the proud attitude of the boy who nearly six years ago was going, without a word, penniless and debonair out of her house. All the woman in her glowed over him.

“I’m not going to be called an adventurer,” he had declared. “I shall not submit Sophie to the indignity of trailing a despised husband after her. I’m not going to use her rank and wealth as a stepping-stone to my ambitions. Let me first attain an unassailable position. I shall have owed it to you, to myself, to anybody you like–but not to my marriage. I shall be somebody. The rest won’t matter. The marriage will then be a romantic affair, and romantic affairs are not unpopular dans le monde ou l’on s’ennuie.”

This declaration was all very well; the former part all very noble, the latter exhibiting a knowledge of the world rather shrewd for one so young. But when would he be able to attain his unassailable position? Some years hence. Would Sophie Zobraska, who was only a few months younger than he, be content to sacrifice these splendid and irretrievable years of her youth? Ursula Winwood looked into the immediate future, and did not see it rosy. The first step toward an unassailable position was flight from the nest. This presupposed an income. If the party had been in power it would not have been difficult to find him a post. She worried herself exceedingly, for in her sweet and unreprehensible way she was more than ever in love with Paul. Meeting Frank Ayres one night at a large reception, she sought his advice.

“Do you mind a wrench?” he asked. “No? Well, then–you and Colonel Winwood send him about his business and get another secretary. Let Savelli give all his time to his Young England League. Making him mug up material for Winwood’s speeches and write letters to constituents about football clubs is using a razor to cut butter. His League’s the thing. It can surely afford to pay him a decent salary. If it can’t I’ll see to a guarantee.”

“The last thing we see, my dear Frank,” she said after she had thanked him, “is that which is right under our noses.”

The next day she went to Paul full of the scheme. Had he ever thought of it? He took her hands and smiled in his gay, irresistible way. “Of course, dearest lady,” he said frankly. “But I would have cut out my tongue sooner than suggest it.”

“I know that, my dear boy.”

“And yet,” said he, “I can’t bear the idea of tearing myself away from you. It seems like black ingratitude.”

“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