Lord Raingo

Fifty-five. Tallish--but stoutish. Dressed like the country gentleman which he was not and never would be. Not by taking any amount of thought can you become a country gentleman. From the lower part of his large and somewhat neglected gardens he looked down Moze slope and over Mozewater. Six miles off Eelpie Sand gleamed dangerously in the March afternoon sun. The tide was rising, creeping with stealth into all the inlets that bordered the Spanish Main of Mozewater. The explosives factory in the middle distance stood now on a tongue of land; in two hours it would be a solitary chimney sticking up forlorn out of the Spanish Main. The tide was never still. Four times a day it punctually changed the face of sixty square miles of earth, omnipotently heedless of air-raids, gun-fire, rumours of invasion. You might go to bed with the moon pouring silver on to an ocean, and get up to see the sun enlighten a sinister marsh intersected by creeks and. rivulets. Every aspect of Mozewater enchanted Mr. Raingo, drew him out of his own melancholy and futility into a melancholy and futility greater, grander, and far more beautiful. There was a speechless poet hidden somewhere in Mr. Raingo, that died often and came back to life, and was authentic.

He opened the wicket and strolled slowly down Moze slope, and in half an hour was level with the vast, semicircular dyke.

Two Thames barges, each manned by two men and a dog, were manoeuvring gingerly up the shallow channels towards the ancient quays and wharves of Flittering--last outpost of solidity against the North Sea. He walked through the village, nodding benevolently here and there to humble persons who saluted him with deference as the richest man in the peninsula and perhaps in the county. As he reached Miss Osyth Drine's cottage--last outpost of the last outpost--and the road dwindled into a green track, a man rather like himself in age and build emerged from the cottage, jumped with enviable agility on to a bicycle and, having perceived Mr. Raingo, at once jumped off again.

"Mr. Raingo?" said the cyclist. "I thought I couldn't be mistaken. I wonder if you'd be so very kind as to give a message to Mrs. Raingo from my wife, and say how sorry she was not to be in when Mrs. Raingo called."

"I certainly will," answered Raingo, urgently asking his memory to identify this slightly too deferential khaki gentleman with the stars of a captain on his tunic.

"I'm Heddle," said the cyclist.

"Of course you are," Raingo agreed with quick urbanity, offering his hand. It was the doctor who had come newly to Hoe village two years earlier and had almost immediately afterwards joined the Royal Army Medical Corps and vanished into distant fields of war. "You've been in Palestine, I think?"

"Yes. Invalided home. I may get charge of a hospital, and in the meantime I'm doing a bit to my own practice." A short, dry laugh.

They walked along together, the bicycle between them.

"Too eager to know me," thought Raingo, with all the suspiciousness natural to his wealth. "Too much kowtow. Too pleased to be talking to me. Not a snob. Only simple. Roughing it and God knows what in Palestine. It wou1d have killed me. And now he's an invalid dashing about on a bike. And my age if he's a day!"

And Raingo, in his secret humiliation, admired the fellow, and had a wild, absurd desire to justify his own inactivity to the simpleton. And Mrs. Raingo had neglected to pay her formal call for two years or more, and even now had probably only called because the husband was at home again. Disgusting. Intolerable. He considered that if a woman believed in the propriety of the astounding country ritual of calls, she ought at least to perform it conscientiously and not insult her neighbours by negligence. Two years! And more!

Raingo mentioned the war news.

"Yes. Serious!" said Captain Heddle. It was his sole and sufficient comment on the great German push.

"I think we shall hold them," said Raingo.

"You do?"

"I do."

"Well, I'm immensely relieved to hear you say so," said Captain Heddle, with obvious sincerity. He was immensely relieved, because Mr. Raingo, being a millionaire, must have information, and must possess judgment, denied to simple soldiers.

"I know nothing--nothing," said Raingo.

But Captain Heddle refused to credit that; he put it down to the modesty of the great, and remained firmly in a state of immense relief.

"I should like to consult you," Raingo burst out surprisingly.

Captain Heddle was raised into bliss.

"One of these days," said Raingo.

"Any time. Now. I'm at your service. An honour, I assure you." (Why did people always go on in this style?) "I could call round to-morrow, if that would suit you."

"I won't trouble you to call. I'll come to you. Later this afternoon, say."

Raingo was very urbane, winning, determined if possible to cure the simpleton of his subservience. They walked side by side slowly up the acclivity to Hoe, the inland metropolis of the peninsula, noting camouflaged block-houses, barbed wire, and other preparations to resist invasion. Captain Heddle said that in any case he should not have ridden up the hill. "I have to keep an eye on my heart," he said.

"Heart!" said Raingo. "That's my trouble, that's just what I wanted to see you about."

They were immediately brothers.

The front door and the garden door of the doctor's house behind Hoe church were both open, and the wind blew through the sunlight-flecked house. The doctor led his august patient into the drawing-room. A poor little room, yet it had the same essentials as the drawing-room at Moze Hall: piano, flowers, photographs. What more could you want?

"My wife isn't in apparently," said Captain Heddle, disappointed; he had clearly taken Mr. Raingo to the drawing-room in order to display the captive to Mrs. Heddle. They passed through a corner of the unkempt garden into the "surgery," which was very small and very shabby, and Raingo began to feel a thrill of expectation. But the doctor was talking about gardens, the Jordan valley, troopships, the popular press, universities.

"That's it," thought Raingo. "He can't concentrate. That's why he's where he is, at his age. Every chance--education, connections, strong, cheerful, and he's a village doctor! When the deuce does he intend to start?"

Then, still chatting, the doctor found a stethoscope, and said:

"Now shall we examine the unruly member?"

Raingo lay down on a high and singularly lumpy sofa, and unbuttoned everything over his chest, and yielded himself like a child to his brother in age bending above him. And for Raingo the grey-haired simpleton was instantly transformed into a medicineman, a magician, an arch-priest endowed with recondite knowledge and unquestionable judgment. Raingo had consulted nearly all the greatest specialists in London and had got no help, no encouragement. His wife had accused him of a mania for doctors; and it was her attitude that had made him see this doctor in his surgery instead of asking him up to the Hall. Fifty times he had lost faith in doctors, but at every fresh doctor he mysteriously found faith again. Heddle was a simpleton, but simpletons had a knack on occasion of being deeply wise, of being seers. He could not concentrate--but he was concentrating now. And might not the state of his own heart have given him a special interest in hearts and therefore a special perception? Did not genius sometimes hide unappreciated in villages?

"The hour of my salvation may be at hand. This simpleton may be my deliverer," thought Raingo. And if it was to be so, the Germans might take Bailleul and drive the Allies into the Channel--he would have such a basis of happiness as no misfortune exterior to himself could shake. He knew then, and admitted, what really mattered to him and what didn't.

The doctor sounded him with an almost exasperating thoroughness. Then the patient had to sit up, and his back also was listened to and overheard.

"Well, this is a long-standing affair," said the doctor at last, gently.

"Yes, yes." Raingo grew garrulous, and related all that all sorts of doctors had told him. The doctor said nothing.

"How long do you give me?" Raingo demanded wistfully, like a defenceless victim. For twelve months past no doctor had given him more than five years--he wanted ten; he longed for ten; he would be content with ten.

"Pooh!" exclaimed the doctor breezily. "You might live any time. Five, ten, twenty years. I knew a case, not exactly the same as yours, but very similar--it was a dozen years ago, and I do believe the cove is still alive."

"Really!"

"Of course you must take care, as I do myself. You don't want to go and catch pneumonia, you know. That might be--er--serious."

Raingo's eyes were moist with gratitude. He was a boy, he was nearly a girl. The war was a skirmish without importance.

"What's this? I can't take this, my dear Mr. Raingo. I really can't!" said the doctor, staring at a five pound note and two half-crowns which Raingo had laid on the surgery desk.

Picking up his hat, Raingo heartily shook the doctor's hand.

"Try!" said he, with a glance suddenly impish. "Try to take it. Do your best. And if you fail, let me know."

He was permitting himself a rich man's freedom. The doctor laughed awkwardly, but his dignity was reassured by the warm, grateful pressure of the patient's fingers.

Moze Hall was incommensurate with the wealth of Raingo. It stood only about forty yards back from the Harwich road (but was well screened therefrom by trees), and comprised about twenty-five rooms, of which only three were bath-rooms. Nevertheless the entrance-hall and the reception-rooms on either side of it were imposing, and there was one large bed-room--his wife's. He had bought the place in 1915 from the executors of his wife's father, and had modernized it, though not thoroughly. However, it sufficed him; and Adela, who had lived in it as a child, loved it--after her fashion of loving. Architecturally it was without style or charm, having been built in 1820. The terraced gardens at the back of the house, with wondrous views over sea and land, were beautiful--except in war time.

Raingo now entered his domain from the road. Weeds had effectively colonized the front garden; the paint was peeling off the gate and off the woodwork of the façade; but these things were excusable and even laudable in the long national ordeal, and they did not offend Raingo. He rang the front-door bell, opened the door, and went in. When he wanted immediate attention on coming home he would ring from outside--it saved time. He drew a chair to the edge of the mat and sat down with his feet on the mat. His intention was to send Skinner, the old butler, for a pair of pumps and to change his very dirty boots on the mat--he had a strong objection to making a mess in the house and an equally strong objection to the labour of cleaning muddy boots on scrapers and mats. His boots were vile with Essex clay, because, out of regard for Wrenkin, he had paid a visit to the great byre, where a few pedigree cattle were huddled.

Wrenkin, aged forty-seven, was the factotum of the estate. An all-round, efficient, honest, industrious, shabby and disagreeable man! He maintained the radiators and the hot-water supply, manufactured the electric current, kept Raingo's car in order, grew vegetables and fruit, fought rear-guard actions against weeds, the cook, and his mistress, and wangled coal and coke from Harwich. All for two pounds a week.

He believed himself to be, and not without some justification, the most remarkable man that ever lived. Everybody hated him except his master. These two understood one another and conversed together on the plane of masculine realism.

No one answered the bell. Raingo opened the door again and rang a second time furiously. There were two telegrams and a circular on the hall table. He opened the telegrams. For his own sake and for the sake of the village he subscribed to the Central News service of war-telegrams. One of the messages read: "Official. Germans broke through West Quentin we retiring good order to prepared positions elsewhere enemy held." The other: "Official. Fighting whole front until late last night we continue hold enemy whose losses exceedingly heavy."

"And what about our losses, you ostriches?" murmured Raingo. Still no one answered the bell. He took off his boots and padded farther into the main hall, crying: "Skinner! Skinner!" Not a sound in the house! What a house! A nice thing, that with five servants in the place, and him a millionaire, he should be reduced to padding about in his socks! He heard a movement above, went towards the stairs and had a glimpse of a print skirt behind the banisters of the landing.

"Edith!" A scurry, and silence.

"Edith!" he roared, with compelling command in his exasperated voice.

A girl appeared, flushed. Yes, it happened to be Edith, one of the housemaids. She was a disgraceful sight, and knew it. Half-past five and she was still in her morning blue print, dirty apron, cap awry!

"Where's Skinner?"

"He's lying down, sir--not very well."

"Your mistress out?"

"Yes, sir."

"When will she be back?"

"She didn't say, sir."

"Well, if Skinner is unwell somebody else ought to be ready to answer the door. Supposing it had been a visitor." Edith's lower lip fell. "There's no excuse for any disorganization inside the house. Tell the cook from me. And here! Take these boots away and bring me some pumps--bottom of my wardrobe, left hand."

What a house! She was a pretty girl, probably about seventeen, with a grimy, perfectly exquisite complexion. And he had scared all the blood into her head.

"Not her fault!" he reflected. "She thinks she's guilty because she can't think straight. She isn't guilty. It's somebody's business to be looking after her and somebody isn't doing it."

He felt the sinister charm of beauty victimized. When she got back (with her apron turned)--he said benevolently:

"Thank you, Edith."

She gave a shy glint of a smile, and hurried from his presence. It was nothing, the veriest insignificant trifle, an infinitesimal fraction of an incident, but two beings had come emotionally together for an instant who probably never would so come together again.

The transient thought of the young mysterious girl living, pulsating, under the same roof with his gross, ageing self, yet millions of miles away, refined his gloom. For he was now all gloom. The buoyancy induced by the doctor's pronouncement had left him. The doctor had good reason to speak smoothly, and no reason whatever to tell the truth. The doctor was a simpleton, and how should a simpleton's views override those of the wisest men in Harley Street? And in what manner could a weak heart make the doctor into a heart-specialist? Absurd! Absurd! Mr. Raingo, the realist, had been womanish enough to believe something for a few minutes because he wanted to believe it!

He went to his room and lay under the eiderdown and without intention slept.

When he awoke it was quite dark. His bedside timepiece blazed forth the hour in the blackness--seven twenty-five. He heard his wife moving about in her bedroom, which was next to his own, with an open door between them.

"That you, Adela?" he called plaintively.

"Yes, dear." Her high, bland, unconcerned voice!

"I was getting a little rest."

"I thought you were."

"The light from your room shows here and my blinds aren't drawn. There's bound to be trouble."

"All right, dear! All right! If it worries you. But really what can it matter? I do think the police are--" She shut the door.

How like her, that speech! Full of misperceptions and inconsequences! He arose, drew down his blinds, turned on the light, brushed his hair, and arranged the wide ends of his blue-and-white checked bow necktie. No more toilet than that, because an important article of his religion was never to be late; he would make any sacrifice to the pride of punctuality. He went into her room. She was fiddling about as usual, doing several things at once; cursed with a mind that darted to and fro and crossways like a minnow; could never do one thing at a time.

"What time is it?" she inquired indifferently.

"Your clock's stopped."

"Has it? They generally manage to stop it, dusting in the morning. I'm just ready."

She was not just ready. She was half dressed, at most.

Daily she had this extraordinary illusion of being ready when she was by no means ready.

"The car broke down outside Frinton. So in the end I borrowed a bicycle."

Her car was continually breaking down; she would drive it and clean it herself--one of her contributions to war economy in labour. He said nothing. She had quite forgotten the time-question. He gazed at the enigma of his existence. She was nearing fifty and slim; she did not look her age; in fact to him she had scarcely changed in twenty-three years. A face not uncomely, but uninteresting. Pale grey eyes that saw through you and through everything into distances. Self-absorbed, placid, tepid, vague. Above all, tepid and vague. Neither kind nor unkind. Unobservant. Untidy and disorderly. No interest nor taste in dress. Her lingerie was about as attractive as a cotton sheet. Instead of her watching over his clothes, he watched over hers. But herself, she had style and dignity and carriage. She was rarely at a loss. She talked adequately and easily--whether to a servant or to a General Officer Commanding. She had race. He hadn't. He did not quite know why she had married him, unless through nonchalance; certainly she had not married him for his money; nor from passion; for she carried nonchalance into love, and in moments of intimacy would emit such remarks as "I wonder where I left my umbrella this afternoon." She played bridge, tennis, and golf, in moderation and moderately well, and sometimes she hunted. Their son Geoffrey had been made a prisoner in 1916, and since then her war-work had been confined to British prisoners' aid. The country-side was dotted with German prisoners employed on farms, but she never even mentioned them.

"It's seven thirty-two," he said at length, determined that she should know the time, whether or not she wanted to know it. The dinner-hour in these years was 7.30.

"Aren't you going to change?"

"No."

He left her. Half-way down the stairs, he noticed that the blinds of the back windows of the hall had not been drawn.

And he noticed the thick dust on the tops of the door-frames--dust which he had pointed out a fortnight ago. Her two Pomeranians were yapping querulously on the oak bench in the hail; the hair of both was caked with mud. He drew the blinds, too exasperated and exhausted to do the right thing and summon a servant. What a house! He inspected the dining-room. Skinner, who needed a bath, had scarcely begun to lay the table. But Raingo said naught; he was resigned, beaten. Then he noticed that the room was very cold, and he felt the radiators, all four of them. Stone cold!

"Why are these radiators turned off?" he demanded, roused to revolt.

"Turned off, sir?"

"Turned off."

"Madam turned them off at lunch, sir, if you remember, and someone must have forgotten to turn them on again."

"Someone"! What a house! No comfort in it. What good was his house to him, his gardens, his cattle? He did not own them--they owned him. He recalled patting the flanks of the cattle--a purely mechanical gesture. They were not his; he had paid for them, but had failed to buy interest in them. His mouth was full of ashes. Ennui! Ennui! And the shadow of death! He always left London for Essex as for an arctic and windy hell. The service-flat in Berkeley Street was far, far better. He saw Skinner anxiously turning on radiators, and quitted the room. In the hall he absently picked up the circular from the table. A telegram lay underneath it. Good God! How futile, in that house, his reiterated ruling that telegrams must be put to the left and letters to the right! More war news. Perhaps a complete break-through by the Germans. But the telegram said "Prime Minister would be grateful if you could breakfast with him to-morrow nine thirty o'clock Poppleham."

Adela was coming down the stairs. Occasionally she seemed to dress with magical rapidity. He let her enter the dining-room while he was collecting his wits; then he followed her. She was seated at the table, now fully set. He smacked the telegram down in front of her.

"Read that. It's been lying under a circular on the hail table for over three hours. I only discovered it by accident."

She read the telegram, and looked through him.

"Who's Poppleham?" she asked.

Adela to the life! "Who's Poppleham?" She rendered him speechless. He did not answer. Presently, surmising vaguely that she had not been tactful, she said: "What do you suppose it is?"

"God knows. Some circus tomfoolery, you bet."

He spoke with a bitterness that was half assumed. He had known the Prime Minister for fifty years, and detested him. After a pause he added:

"But I shall have to go. A P.M.'s a P.M., you know."

"Skinner," he said sharply, when the soup approached. Is Wrenkin anywhere about?"

"Yes, sir, he's doing the boilers."

"Tell him to come to me at once."

"Here, sir?"

"Here. At once. Run."

Wrenkin, ash-stained, shabby, cap in hand, arrived at once, scowling and efficient. He was a nervous and sensitive man, with a woman's intuitiveness; and he had divined some inconvenient urgency of the master's own.

"I say, Wrenkin, can you drive me to Colchester?" Raingo inquired benevolently.

"Yes, sir."

"How soon?"

"Any time, sir."

"In ten minutes?"

"Yes, sir. I must just see she's filled up."

"Say a quarter of an hour, then. Thanks," said Raingo, having glanced at the clock and at his watch.

Wrenkin departed.

"But there's no train to Liverpool Street to-night," said Adela.

"Bring the next dish, Skinner," said Raingo. "There's the Ipswich express, I suppose."

"But it doesn't stop."

The train service had been cut to bits.

"It'll stop all right when I show this telegram to the station-master," said Raingo grimly.

In ten minutes the big car was shaking on the gravel outside.

"Get my light overcoat and my big one, Skinner. But bring me some boots first."

Chewing meat, Raingo put on both coats, and stuffed a couple of apples into the pockets. At the door Adela kissed him blandly. She did not ask whether he needed anything. But he did not. He kept duplicates of all necessaries whatsoever at the service-flat. The car went ahead, curved, and threw the dimmed lights on to the gates. And then Raingo yielded himself to an almost wild elation.

That same night in darkened London, Raingo went by bus to Pall Mall (there being no taxis at Liverpool Street), and visited first his club, which was apparently quite empty of members and had the air of awaiting with grim and solemn fortitude the sound of the last trump. Escaping intimidated from its twilit vastness, he walked a few hundred yards to Orange Street, and, drawing in advance a bunch of keys from his pocket, opened a door upon which shone faintly a small brass plate: "Imperial Re-investment Company." He looked about, as though for spies. Not a soul in the narrow, mysterious street. Not a slit of a gleam from any curtained window. Only the shafts of searchlights moving restlessly overhead. He vanished within.

The sea of London had closed over him. He was safe, undiscoverable. In the blackness his accustomed finger found instantly an electric switch, and a naked lamp shone at the head of a narrow staircase facing the door. An office staircase, rather shabby with worn linoleum. He climbed it, slowly. At the top on the left was a small landing with heavy blue curtains hiding a second staircase, and a glazed door on the right: "Imperial Re-investment Company." He tried the door.

"Oh! She doesn't keep this locked. But of course there's no need to."

He entered and lit the office. It had all the apparatus of an office, including several shelves of Amberg files, and it was so orderly, unsoiled and shining that it might have been a model office in some Business Exhibition. The blotting paper on the principal desk bore traces of writing. He tore off the top sheet and, examining it in the mirror of the overmantel, deciphered "Samuel Raingo, Esq." in a feminine hand. He tore up the blotting paper into small pieces, dropped them into the new waste-paper basket, left the office, and pulled aside the blue curtains on the landing.

Another lamp was burning at the head of the second staircase. The character of this staircase was very different from that of the first. The stairs were thickly carpeted in blue, with bright stair-rods, and on glistening walls hung pictures in rich frames. The lamp was veiled in a large silk shade of Chinese design. Now was business giving way to a luxurious domesticity. Sam Raingo ascended towards the bower with eager anticipation of balm and solace. He was vitalised, young. He felt adventurous and romantic. He was about to enter into his refuge from the comfortless and unsatisfying, desolate world, and to taste the reward which he had conceived and created for himself. He thought boyishly: "In another moment I shall surprise her," and he made more noise than he need have made, so as not to produce alarm in addition to surprise. At the same time he had a qualm of apprehension, thinking: "Surprise visits may be dangerous. Suppose--" The qualm was gone again.

There were two doors on the landing. He pushed a switch controlling all three staircase lights and simultaneously opened the nearest door, into a drawing-room. As he did so, a door on the right within the room swung towards him, and a young woman appeared, pale and agitated. She softly shut the door behind her and softly turned the key in the lock.

"Oh, Sam, how you startled me!"

"Did I?" he said, disturbed and at a loss. A difficult pause. "I had to come up to town on business," he said. "And I thought I'd look in. No time to let you know."

He took off his hat and dropped into an easy chair by the embers of a fire. The girl knelt at the fire and quickly tended it and persuaded it into flames. Then she rose and stood over him, bending. She was a big girl, beautiful in features and figure, not stout, but plump and tremendously developed; very dark, with black hair, large black eyes, olive skin and a faint dark down on her upper lip.

"Then you love me," she murmured, smiling.

She kissed and clasped him and bore against him, pressing him back into the great chair.

He was buried under her, lost. He ought to have been, he at his age, happy in her abandoned, enveloping youthfulness which squandered itself so generously upon him. But death was in his heart. His body made no response to hers. Surprise visits were indeed dangerous. They were fatal. He knew that when he left that room he would leave behind the one thing that rendered earth habitable, his romance. The Prime Minister's summons had suddenly become of no account whatever. Even the German attack had lost the acuteness of its menace. No wonder she had been an actress! What an actress she was! What actresses they all were!

"Why are you wearing those things?" he asked nicely, for at acting he was at least her equal.

"What things? These?" She touched her bosom. She was certainly nervous. "Oh, darling, when you aren't here . . . what does it matter? . . . If I'd known of course . . "

She was wearing a very old and plain night-dress, and over it a tattered, slatternly dressing-gown. Nothing on her feet. He glanced round the room and missed various pieces of fairly expensive bric-à-brac , some costly cushions, and a Chinese rug. A formidable, a revolting thought, that in the next room, on the other side of the door there, a man--a young man--was awaiting, in bravado or terror, the upshot of her adroit acting! And he, Sam, was the old man, deceived, exploited--and humiliated. He divined all the truth. She had lied to the young man also. She had persuaded him that she was pure and therefore poor. That was why she was wearing the rags of her pre-Samuel days, and why she had hidden away the more glittering evidences of prosperity. She was full of common sense and cleverness. Folly! Frightful and ridiculous folly of an old man--no, not really old, but old in her eyes!--to believe in the rectitude of her affections! Amazing duplicity on her part! And yet was it amazing? Was it not rather the usual thing in such cases, was it not common form? All young mistresses of old men were unfaithful. All! To have imagined that his was the one exception merely proved him a simpleton.

Naturally he sprang from the state of being a simpleton to the state of being a cynic. He laughed mortally in his heart. He would clear up the situation before he departed, at any cost. Either she should confess fully on his demand, or he would go into the bedroom and face the poacher. Dangerous, but he would do it; he must do it; to do it was a necessity of his nature, for he was not the sort of person who would walk out, dissembling, and spy from the street, and, having obtained his evidence, go home and write a stinging letter of dismissal. There might in fact be a row, the police, a scandal. Instead of being with the Prime Minister to-morrow morning he might be at Vine Street. And he was an adulterer . . . his wife . . . So much the worse, but in spite of every risk he would clear up the situation. Folly! Folly! An old fool! Never mind! He had his ruinous pride.

To perfect his dissimulation he squeezed the girl with his hand. And all the while he was reflecting upon the best method of opening the attack. Should he talk quietly, or should he fly at her in an overwhelming outburst of just anger. She responded to his pressure; she kissed him.

"Sam," she breathed. "I'd better tell you. I can't keep anything from you. I've got my little sister in there, Gwen. She was in a hole and she rang me up, and so I told her she could sleep here to-night. That's really why I'm wearing these rags. And why I've hidden a lot of things. Haven't you noticed?" He nodded, non-committal. "I don't want her to think--you know. I told her I was secretary to the Company and only up here temporarily in charge. You don't mind, do you?"

"I don't mind," said he, kindly, but in a tone that gave nothing away.

Ingenious liar she was! Sister indeed! He vaguely remembered that she had once mentioned a sister or half-sister, but no more than that. And no doubt he was expected to go silently away, in order not to disturb the poor tired little sister who was in a hole--and leave a man in the bedroom! Pleasing idea! What next? She had locked the door. Why had she locked the door? To protect her little sister?

"She was bus-conducting, you know. They told her to go--said she wasn't strong enough, but it was really because she was too pretty, and too young for that job. Seems a shame, doesn't it?"

"It does," said Sam, still non-committal: but he was dumbfounded.

Then she crept towards the bedroom door; turned the key with infinite precaution, very gently opened the door and peeped in. And with a smile she beckoned to Sam, and put her finger to her lips, and Sam, mesmerised, scarcely conscious, followed her and peeped into the bedroom over her shoulder, and saw in one half of the bed a young fair girl, not unlike Delphine in feature, her blonde hair spread across the pillow. She was wearing a common little chemise; one small hand lay on the eiderdown--and it was the worn, grimy hand of a bus conductor that could not be restored in fifty washings to its rightful tints. The girl was in a deep, calm sleep. As Delphine pushed him from the doorway he had time to notice on a chair a pile of shabby clothes and a pair of deplorable boots under the chair. Delphine re-locked the door, saying:

"In case she wakes, and gets up to look for me."

For a few moments Sam dared not attempt to speak, lest he should sob--yes, sob--and he averted his eyes that Delphine might not see the wet shine on them. He made a diversion by taking off his overcoat. It was not remorse for his suspicion that moved him, but the touching sad beauty of the scene in the other room. Delphine, the maternal sister, half proud, half shamed, wholly protective! The younger girl, fragile, exhausted from the hard, responsible labour of conducting a motor-bus, pathetically sunk in sleep! He simply dismissed his suspicions as silly, as unworthy of his common sense and of his insight into character. He owed her no apology, for fortunately she had suffered nothing through his silliness. But she rose in his esteem. He had been right from the very first about that girl.

At his city office, where he managed his estate, she had survived, among others the selective sieve of his head clerk, Swetnam, in a crowd of applicants for a typewriting situation.

She had been shown into his private room. He glanced at her, she at him. In two seconds the magic was begun. "You aren't quite the sort," he said. "But I might have something else for you. Call this afternoon at four." At four, he said: "Very sorry, I must go out. Walk along with me a little, will you?" Then he took her into a tea-shop. She was obviously very poor. He asked her if she was Jewish. She said she didn't know, had never heard that she was. Her name was Leeder. Her parents were dead; her father had been a head bill-clerk in a large department store. She had tried the stage and had called herself an actress, but had never got further than the chorus. Yes, she had. She had once had one line to speak every night for twelve nights. Then she had learnt typewriting. "I only asked you about being Jewish because Jews generally have an instinct for finance and that might be useful if what I have in mind comes to anything." Thus had Sam spoken, having only one thing in his mind. She was a restful companion at tea, and Sam had been living desolating days in the domestic aridity of Moze Hall. She seemed to him to have just the qualities which he needed in a woman. Next they were dining together at the Savoy Café. She wore a new hat and kept her nerve; but he saw that she had had little experience of the ritual of luxury; he had years earlier had to learn the ritual himself and he had an eye for the slightest signs of ignorance.

The affair was begun. He told her his age and circumstances. He used his money dazzlingly. He did not tell her that he was in love with her; but she discovered that for herself. What helped him with her was the plain fact that he was a tyro--he had never wandered from his nonchalant wife; it had never till then seriously occurred to him to do so. Delphine resisted him. She fought him on equal terms. Her youth and beauty and his passion for her, against his money. She fought illogically, and when according to all rules and precedents she ought to have yielded, she grew stiffer and stiffer. He won his victory only after a really terrible, ugly, messy affray. But her surrender was complete. She adored him without reserve. She worshipped him. She was acquiescence incarnate. They were in heaven. This happened in 1917. He installed her, or rather she installed herself unaided, save by his money, in Orange Street. The office, and the imaginary company (one of his elfish fancies or inventions), were a cover, but they enabled her on a tiny scale to play at finance, for which he convinced himself that she had some natural gift.

"We must see if we can't do something for this sleeping sister," he said benevolently.

She shut his mouth with a tender kiss.

"Darling, I won't have you troubling about Gwen. I can look after her myself, and my relations are not going to be a nuisance to you. Now tell me about yourself. I want to know. Why have you had to come up to London to-night so suddenly?"

He told her in a few words. She sat up straight.

"And they stopped the express for you at Colchester!"

"They did. And believe me, my dear, it was a wonderful moment. The train came in at such a rate that I didn't think it would stop, though the signals were against it all right. Then I could hear the wheels grinding, and be blowed if the thing didn't come to a standstill! People opened the carriage doors to see what was happening--they daren't pull up the window-blinds. The station master put me into the train himself."

"How thrilling!"

"Yes, it was."

"And what do you suppose he wants with you?"

"Who? The P.M.? Something he can't get from anyone else--you may be sure of that!"

"But what?" Delphine insisted.

"Give it up."

"I believe he wants to make you a minister," said the girl proudly.

"Him! He'd lose the war first. I've known him for fifty years. And he's always had his knife into me. I was in the House eight years, and I never even got the chairmanship of a Committee. All thanks to him. And that was one reason why I chucked the House. Didn't like me. Some folks said afraid of me, but I doubt that. He's physically afraid, but never morally. I'll say that for him, because I know it. I know him through and through."

As he spoke Sam had a sense of pride too; pride in his long, hostile connection with the exalted P.M.; pride in his having been important enough for the P.M. to dislike possibly to fear; pride in so casually showing to the lowly Delphine that her Sam was something more than a mere millionaire. He added:

"Besides, what minister would he want to make me?"

"Well, what was that Sir somebody or other who retired the other day--illness or something?"

"Oh! Ministry of Records, eh, you think? No, my child. No! And you may bet the P.M. wants me to do something for nothing--no kudos, no anything. That's him. And of course I shall have to do it. . . . But a minister! I smile. I just smile an imperceptible, genial smile. Oh, not cynical! I wouldn't be cynical for anything."

"You are funny, you old silly," she breathed, smiling to herself. "And so's your silly old bow." She lovingly patted into symmetry his checked bow-necktie. "Sometimes after you've gone and I think of the funny things you've said, I almost burst out laughing. I do. But you'll see, about being a minister. You'll see."

He was exceedingly happy. Of course it was absurd about his being a minister--still, stranger things than that had happened. But it was not the off-chance of being a minister that caused him to be happy. It was their intimacy, which the episode of Gwen had somehow rendered closer and lifted to a higher plane. He liked to know about her sister; the knowledge broadened their relationship, humanised it, made her more than a mistress. He even liked her now to be wearing a shabby night-dress and dressing-gown; the shabbiness gave her some resemblance to a wife; and--astounding medley of contradictory emotions--he enjoyed the illusion of her wifehood. And the affair was not folly; it was wisdom itself. After all, a liaison was no more an exception than a rule. She was young, but he was not too old for her. They did like men much older than themselves; they said so; he had often heard it from men and from women too; and it was true. In girls there was something morbid to which age in a man appealed both spiritually and sensually.

She was ideal--or almost ideal. She lived in him and for him. She loved him with the extreme passionateness of her temperament. She was beautiful, and so lissom; so full of life even in her passivity. She had sleepy eyes in which love dreamed for ever. She had a quiet voice, which never talked of herself but always of him. Her affectionate curiosities about him were insatiable. She strove everlastingly to please him. A word of praise thrilled her. She was neat; she was punctual,; her rooms were impeccably clean and tidy. She did not yearn restlessly for pleasure, or change, or companionship. She said that she had no friends and wanted none. At night there was not even a servant in her rooms. (And except at night he never entered her rooms.) Withal she was no odalisque. She tried to improve herself, to make herself interesting to him. Did she not keep an eye on politics? She had no faults.

If she had a fault, it was a tendency towards melancholy. The war made her gloomy and pessimistic. The casualty rolls reduced her to the very depths of blank, prostrate despondency. He had to lie to her in his interpretations of military events. And her grievous anxiety as to his health was touching, sometimes to the point of painfulness. When, thinking to gladden her, he related the bright verdict of the village doctor, she pretended to be relieved, but the pretence was not very convincing. However, as he made progress in the study of her character, he was gradually learning how to deal with this tendency of hers. And perhaps also it was a fault in her that she allowed all her other interests to wither away in subservience to himself and her affection for him. She seemed to have completely lost interest in the stage; her canteen work, on three days a week, had become chiefly a tiresome task to be got through; her operations in the office below were a trifling diversion. What apparently she desired was to be utterly free till at night he arrived and she could kiss and adore him with her spirit and body fresh and unfatigued. Of course he liked her to be thus absorbed in him. But the responsibility of being her whole source of life irked and even frightened him. He would have desired her both to be and not to be what she was.

"You must go home now, dearest," she said.

"No."

"Are they expecting you at the flat to-night?"

"No."

"You must have a good night's rest. To-morrow. The strain. There's no knowing what's in store for you. Oh, darling, I do want you to do big things; but I'm afraid for your heart. And I'm afraid all this will mean I shan't see so much of you."

"Yes, you will."

"Not if it's going to tire you, I shan't."

She stood up and took the telephone from the mantelpiece.

"What are you doing?"

"'Phone for you to the flat."

She spoke with firm decision. She was marvellously modest, having regard to her youth and beauty and his attachment to her. She accepted his ukases. She asked for nothing. She was content to lie hidden as his mistress, with no position and no hope of one, never a plain gold ring on her finger. And yet sometimes she ruled him, blandly self-reliant, in the unconscious exercise of the power of her youth and beauty.

Telephone in hand she sank back on him, supporting her shoulders against his chest. Her hair was in his eyes. He was her couch. An exquisite fancy! She said a number.

"Is that the Berkeley Mansion? . . . Speaking for Mr. Samuel Raingo . . ."

When she had given orders about his bedroom, she clicked the receiver on to its hook, and still lay where she was, and sighed, and moved her head and offered her lips. Then she arose and gently pushed him out of the easy chair and helped him with his overcoat. And she stood at the top of the stairs and watched him slowly descend. She had dismissed the great Raingo. Yes, she ruled him; and he loved it. What remained in his mind, apart from the memory of the delicious weight of her soft body and the scent of her hair on his face, was her extraordinary ready assumption that he would be given a ministry. They were all alike in love, self-convinced that the potentialities of the beloved were boundless.

See that young man walking down Whitehall the next morning--a bright, auspicious morning! Walking not quickly, because of his heart, and because he wished to arrive fresh and cool; but with his shoulders thrown energetically back, and his knee-joints straightened out at every firm step. No sign on his ordinary face that he was not the ordinary successful middle-aged man pretending to himself to be young; the common husband who left his wife at home on Saturdays in order by means of golf to reinforce salts and tonics in the great fight against uric acid. Nevertheless he was a youth. His youthful nostrils sniffed the air eagerly, adventurously, and his grey eyes had a glint of challenge. His brain was a whirlpool lighted by electricity. Excitement was growing in him and engendering defiance. He almost panted to come to grips with the Prime Minister and fate. The fact that through the seething night he had scarcely slept did not apparently affect him--save to heighten his pugnacious self-confidence. He had not felt so creative and so intensely alert since the morning of the day, years earlier, when, after terrible suspense, he had made a million and a quarter in one interview over a deal in ships. All his wits were marshalled and brilliant and straining for the word "Attack."

He did not get into Downing Street without being halted by a policeman, but his demeanour was naturally such as to inspire trust in policemen. Several young men were 1oafing round the door of No.10, mean but made august by tradition. He rang, and while he waited one of the young men said to him in a tone ingratiating and brazen:

"Excuse me, sir, but are you Mr. Raingo?"

"Raingo! Raingo? Do I look like him?"

" Sorry, sir."

"Why not, after all?" he asked himself. He turned, smiling quizzically at the loafers as the door opened, and said aloud: "Well, perhaps I am, but I won't answer for it."

All the young men laughed, and four press-cameras clicked.

He entered No. 10 for the first time, he who had sat on the Government benches for eight years and who had known the Prime Minister from youth up.

"This clock right?" he asked the butler in the hall.

"Yes, sir."

The clock showed twenty-eight minutes past nine.

"The clocks here have to be right, sir," the butler added with pride and a respectful humour, on the stairs.

"Well," said Sam. "There's nothing like discipline for clocks and dogs."

"No, sir."

He was introduced into a nondescript room set with a youngish plump lady and a breakfast table laid for three.

"Mr. Raingo," said the butler to the lady.

"Miss Packer?" said Raingo interrogatively, when she had greeted him and they had shaken hands.

She nodded twice, smiling with a contented, contemplative expression, as though saying: "Yes, I am that celebrated woman, whom everybody governmental, of any country, has to deal with if he wants to deal with the Prime Minister. I am the Prime Minister's personal secretary; and Mr. Poppleham, M.P., is my washpot. And there are some who say that I rule the Empire."

She was austerely dressed in dark blue, with thin borders of white at the neck and wrists. She had brown hair, blue eyes, and the soft, downy complexion of a peach. But she was older than her marvellous complexion; she might have been thirty four or five; the realism of a birth certificate might have run to thirty-six. She was bright as the morning, efficiently and continuously bright, bright when she spoke and bright when she listened or reflected. And her glance and carriage indicated that, unlike many personal secretaries dedicated to the comfort and convenience of great men, she was not suffering from suppressed desires. She had the air of being familiar with every variety of human character and experience and knowledge, and of mysteriously hiding a thousand secrets and a thousand personal opinions. Her brightness was a veil, a camouflage. Withal, the splendid role of efficiency and brightness seemed to lie a little heavy upon her.

"Now, Mr. Raingo, do you take tea or coffee? It saves time, I find, if one can get these important things settled before the Prime Minister comes in."

Raingo laughed to himself at the histrionics of the affair. He said that he took tea, with milk and no sugar.

"Milk first? Or tea first? . . . Porridge? Fish? Bacon?" She was at the sideboard, conducting it with spoons and forks as with a baton.

Raingo would have a little fish--only a little.

"You aren't a great breakfast-eater?"

"No."

"The Prime Minister will be disappointed at you not joining him in porridge."

"It may suit him," Raingo shrugged his shoulders, moving restlessly on the hearthrug, and regarding this as the first blow in the affray. "Let him be disappointed!" he thought.

As a fact he had already eaten a plenteous breakfast at the service flat. He wanted no stomachic preoccupations while breakfasting with Apollyon.

Miss Packer was pouring out tea for herself when Andrew Clyth came into the room.

"Prime Minister," Raingo greeted him, rising.

The Prime Minister returned the greeting:

"How do, Sam?" he opened, with extreme geniality.

"You're beginning this wrong," thought Raingo, and replied casually:

"How do, Andy?"

Miss Packer maintained admirably her self-control.

There he was, the offspring of the Scotch father and the Irish mother; the boy upon whose front teeth Sam had once bruised his knuckles in Eccles, Manchester; the man who for years had treated him with such curt, negligent, offensive condescension at their chance meetings in and about the House! Why had Andy always, since their rise in the world, behaved so to him? Partly from envy and partly from fear, Sam had long ago decided. Envy of his riches! Andy was poor. He had no profession, and about a thousand a year or less from the estate of his cotton-broking father. He was dependent upon office for a livelihood--humiliating situation for a politician. How he must hate the legend of Sam's vast income, thought Sam gleefully! . . . And fear lest Sam, the other mightiness of Eccles, might rival and even surpass him in renown. That fear must now be over, for Andy, intimidating foreign statesmen, bullying War Offices, and shoving his finger into every pie of strategy and diplomacy and industry, he was at the head of the greatest empire and directing the greatest empire and directing the greatest war in earth's history. He could rise no higher. He could only fall. And there he was--Andy!--in a black velvet jacket that wonderfully set off his smooth grey hair, silver-tongued, urbane, jolly, charming, persuasive, with a background of command, of power; completely equal to the part he had to play.

And Sam could see clearly in him the Eccles schoolboy, the same lanky, scraggy, slim figure, the same big ears, the same cruel teeth that displayed themselves formidably when he laughed or smiled, the same darting yellowish eyes, the same covert glance, continually inquiring as it were apprehensively what sort of impression he was making on his company. And he wanted something from Sam that only Sam could give! And it would be something considerable, for Sam was the sole guest. Sam was having a Downing Street breakfast all to himself.

They sat down immediately. Miss Packer pushed away the brass tea-tray a little, to make room for her plate of porridge. The battle was joined. Sam was alive again, after years of coma. The blood seemed to tingle in his veins.

"Well, Sam, how's things? You look pretty fit."

Andrew Clyth seemed to have decided that the years should roll back to their boyhood. He dropped easily, and even with exaggeration, into the full accent of the past--Lancashire grafted on to his father's Lowland Scotch: an accent which the political world of London had ameliorated but never cured.

"I'm all right, lad. So are you by the look of ye."

"I suppose I am, considering. But I woke up in the middle of the night, Miss Packer."

"I'm sorry to hear that, sir."

"I must have been awake at least five minutes. A glass and a half instead of a glass, Sam. Claret, that was it. Shows how sensitive the machine is, doesn't it? You know I never wake up, and I always have to be called. You sleep well?"

"Very well," lied Sam.

"That's good. What I say is, the first duty of a statesman is to sleep well. Look at Napoleon. Gladstone. My wife says I'm the greatest sleeper she ever knew. But I'm not what I call the perfect expert in sleep, because I can't sleep in the daytime."

"Oh, sir!" Miss Packer protested against this belittlement.

"What?"

"Have you forgotten last week but one already?"

"Oh, yes, of course. I oughtn't to forget one of my finest achievements." His eyes twinkled at Sam. "You know we've had one or two lively nights round this way lately. Seemed to be touch and go once or twice with the old B.E. Well, I went to bed at seven one morning and gave orders I wasn't to be awakened. Cabinet meeting at eleven. They postponed it till the afternoon. And it didn't happen in the afternoon either. I woke at eight in the evening, much to the relief of the surrounding population. I went to bed again at twelve-thirty and had quite a good night. It's the only way. The only way. Bacon please."

Miss Packer, smiling proudly at Sam, as if to say "What a man!" went to the sideboard with the sleeper's porridge-plate in her hand.

"Tell me," said Sam, showing no enthusiasm whatever for the unique feat of sleeping, "how do ye do for beds, you prime ministers and Chancellors of the Exchequer that have to live in these furnished houses? Do you bring your own, or are you satisfied with the mattresses of Gladstone and Salisbury?"

"Dashed if I know! I could sleep on a rail," Andy laughed heartily.

"Do you like it?"

"Like what?"

"This living in other people's houses. Same as a Wesleyan itinerant minister, eh? Change every three years." And Sam laughed.

But the Prime Minister grinned coldly, disclosing even more of his teeth than when he laughed. He had a passion for the Scottish Presbyterian Church and looked askance at any bantering at any sect that, like the Scottish Presbyterian, differed from the Church of England. In England he was a staunch nonconformist. Awaiting his bacon, he abruptly shifted without apology to another topic.

"Seen the communiqués this morning, Sam?"

Sam nodded shortly.

"Dull, eh? I've tried to get some colour into 'em, but those fellows at G.H.Q. don't seem to know what you're talking about if you mention colour."

"I don't believe in colour in official reports," said Sam stiffly, resolute to repay Andrew for the recent snub.

"No?" Andrew exclaimed charmingly, winningly, gratefully, as though Sam had opened up to him a new vista of ideas.

"No. Colour's a snare. Look at yesterday's paper. I reckon the fellow was trying to give you a bit of colour when he mentioned those hundred prisoners."

"A hundred and forty in all."

"Well, a hundred and forty. That's worse. And then he brought in a few more in his afternoon screed."

"And why not?" Andrew's tone was the naïve tone of asking for information.

"Why not? When the Boche has just been taking tens of thousands of ours. And we have to mention a paltry hundred or so! Makes the thing ridiculous in the eyes of every Englishman who reads it. I don't think those G.H.Q. fellows have the faintest notion what an Englishman is!"

"You're right, Sam. You're right." The Prime Minister yielded the point with grace, with admiration.

Sam momentarily softened towards him. A fair-minded chap, after all, open to conviction! Andy had evidently learnt a bit since Eccles. Never, at Eccles, would he have said, either to Sam or to anybody else who had contradicted him, "You're right." Then Sam hardened again, relentless. Andy was not going to come the Prime Minister over him. Besides, he had often heard of Andy's damnable wizardry of demeanour and tone when he was after something. To look at the chap now one would think from his confidential, intimate, benevolent air that he and Sammy had been as thick as thieves all their lives, and that Sammy had no greater admirer than Andy. Was the chap such a simpleton as to believe that he, Sam, had forgotten all those sterile years in the House? No! He could not be such a simpleton. He was merely relying upon the average weakness of human nature. He merely did not know his Sammy.

And yet, in that very moment, Sam felt naïvely proud of being thus situated with the illustrious and powerful Prime Minister, and of Miss Packer's imperfectly hidden uneasiness as she saw her Titan so audaciously and grimly withstood.

He went on to defend the writer of the communiqués, who had to try to please everyone, and whose task was complicated by indirect influences from London, such as Andy's.

Impossible that the communiqués should ever be satisfactory to common sense, that they should ever be other than psychologically stupid. It was part of the comprehensive stupidity of the military mind.

"What d'ye think of our propaganda, Sam?" Andy stopped him suddenly, and pushed his cup along the cloth for more tea.

A warning bell sounded in Sam's brain. The breakfast-table was a collection of remains; the interview was maturing; the crisis was approaching; drama was at hand.

"I don't know anything about it," said Sam carelessly, to conceal his excitement. The thought of Delphine shot through his brain. Women! Their devilish intuitions! No! It couldn't be a ministry; it could only be a demand for help in some special channel.

"Yes, you do. You know what everyone knows. You have international interests. You've got material for judgment, and you can judge."

"What particular propaganda?"

"Well, say in the United States."

"Well, it's obvious what's wrong there. You're directing it all from the Atlantic coast. You're giving the same stuff to the Middle West and California as you're giving to New York. No sense to it. There are three different mentalities, outlooks, whatever you like to call it, in the States, and what suits one may be absolute poison to the others. If there must be a central direction it ought to be in Chicago."

The Prime Minister tapped his teeth.

"Something in that."

Said Miss Packer in her fluting voice:

"You haven't forgotten, sir, that you yourself said much the same thing last year?"

"Did I? Where?"

"To the deputation that you sent over to inquire, just before it started."

"Well, I had forgotten. Are you sure?"

"Quite, sir."

"Anyhow if I did, I'm not the only person who forgot. Because nothing's been done." Again the Prime Minister laughed heartily, as at a joke against himself.

Miss Packer rose and put cigars and cigarettes on the table. Sam negligently took a cigar. Andy also.

"If I may be excused, sir--"

"What time's that munitions affair fixed for?"

"Ten-thirty, sir."

Miss Packer departed, without a glance at Sam. Why had she been present? There had been no trace of secretarial apparatus anywhere. Nor had she received any instructions. Andy must have given her some secret sign to leave.

The two men lighted their cigars, from the same match.

"And France?"

"Well," said Sam. "I'm only a business man. What do you want me to tell you about your propaganda in France--especially as I don't know a thing."

"Go on, Sam. Go on. I can see you've got an idea. Out with it."

"Even if I had got an idea, it would be no use to your people."

"Why not?"

"Because all these mushroom ministries of yours are just as sodden with the beautiful British Civil Service tradition as the Foreign Office itself. There isn't a big daily paper in Paris that can't be bought, somehow--I've proved that more than once in my little flotations--but you're too damned gentlemanly to buy 'em. Quite as cheap in the end, much simpler, and much quicker."

"Quite. Just so. But is it so simple as all that?"

"No!" said Sam, almost savagely. "It isn't. I realize that well enough, and you know I realize it. But the attitude's all wrong and wants altering--that's what I say. Look at the results up to date. The business of your propaganda in France is to make us popular in France. Are we popular in France? Why, we're more popular in Germany than in France. If you spent a paltry half-million in direct bribery you'd do wonders--especially if besides that you hired a gang to do to one or two of their leading Anglophobe journalists what the French did themselves to Jaures."

"Sam," said the Prime Minister, smiling, "I see you've got the hang of the thing--as usual. Supposing I gave you half a million to play with, would you guarantee results?"

"You wouldn't give it to me to play with, for a start. Immediately I began to play with it I should have the Ministry of Records against me in a body, and not only them but the Treasury, and not only them but the entire Cabinet. But I admit it wouldn't be simple even if you all agreed. Still, there's a lot in what I say. The principle's right, anyhow." Sam gazed at his cigar, which he was smoking with the greatest care, in order to prove to himself, and to everybody who cared to look, that he was in calm possession of all his wits. Andy's cigar, he noticed with satisfaction, was in process of being masticated.

The Prime Minister answered:

"The principle's right. And I was right."

"What do you mean, you were right?"

"It's like this, my son. The Portfolio of Records is vacant--you know that. As you are aware the name is only a camouflage." Sam nodded impatiently. "Its sole work is to boost this country all over the world. Now, I know you. You know me. I'll talk straight. I want you to take on this job. I said you were the man for it. I've always considered you one of the finest publicity experts in England. You yourself admit you've had experience of publicity in Paris. You've owned newspapers here. In short, thou art the man, Sammy. And none other. Now!"

As he spoke, an expression of splendidly conferring a tremendous favour grew on the Prime Minister's features. He could not hide it, and had no desire to hide it. Why indeed should he? Was he not, with a single grandiose gesture, raising Sam to a giddy and unhoped-for pinnacle, picking him out of the dust of political failure and setting him on high? A Prime Minister alone could do such a mighty deed. Sam would owe everything to Andy, be in his debt for evermore. The moment was terrific. Andy had to walk about.

In a hundred financial deals, in some of which millions of money and triumph and ruin had hung in the balance for days of protracted and intricate negotiations, Sam had learnt how to wear a mask falsifying all his wishes and emotions. He prepared it and wore it now. The Prime Minister, unsurpassed for force, enterprise, originality of resource, courage and chicane, was not Sam's equal in the manipulation of masks. And Sam had suddenly been visited by a marvellous scheme. In an instant he saw the scheme complete. Triumph exceeding all hopes was his in exchange for the mere acceptance. But he had perceived the chance of doubling the triumph. The gambler in him took charge. He nodded, as if to himself, and put his lips together.

"I was afraid you were going to ask me that," he said sadly, as one who would have liked to confer an immense favour, but was prevented from doing so by circumstances over which he had no control. At high tension he thought of the phrase, "the great game," for the first time in his life fully realizing the truth of it, and feeling in his bowels that the present was a far greater game than any finance. There was no finance in it at all--there was only glory, prestige, power; chiefly power.

"What?" said Andy, obviously nonplussed, and then uneasily suspecting that depths existed in Sam deeper than he had ever guessed.

"I couldn't take it on. I can't." Despair and blank disappointment were in Sam's voice.

"But what's the matter, Sam?" The Prime Minister bent towards Sam, and almost over him; and in his rich, world-renowned voice was a tone of strong, masterful, slightly superior persuasiveness, as of one of the "saved" at a revival meeting of Sam's youth, wrestling with the obstinacy of a sinner whom the devil would not release. "This is a united call from the Cabinet. The King approves. The country needs you. . .We've got our backs to the wall. . . . You can't refuse."

Sam was thrilled by the words. He looked up gravely, appreciatively, reproachfully.

"I see all that. I needn't tell you, Andy, I'm as anxious as anyone to do anything I can to help. I'd jump at the chance."

He no longer thought of the thing as the great game or as any game. At the suggestive magic of Andy's tone he saw the horrors of the Front, the slaughter of youth, the weeping of bereaved homes, the abstract grief of sensitive Delphines, the celebrated menace to civilization. His response to the mood of the Prime Minister was histrionic in origin, yet it convinced his soul and he became for the moment a genuine martyr to circumstance. He felt himself capable of a supreme sacrifice if only the sacrifice were not to be rendered futile.

"Then what is it?"

Sam explained in a few bold, effective words about his heart.

"But damn it, man, lots of us have weak hearts! You can carry on your own affairs. You can surely help to carry on the affairs of the country." The Prime Minister was now enheartening a child, a hypochondriac, mildly reproving a milksop.

"No doctor will give me more than five years--at least no London specialist will. And only that on condition that I avoid all strain. I've been particularly warned against the strain of public speaking." This was an exaggeration of a single remark to the effect that lengthy speechifying in a large hall could have no beneficent influence on a weak heart; but Sam now honestly, if temporarily, believed that he would drop down dead in the middle of any speech.

"But, my dear fellow," the Prime Minister expostulated, using a form of address unknown in Eccles, which he had picked up in converse with members of the real old official class, "But, my dear fellow, there's no question of public speaking. There can't be. Your ministry is practically the same as Secret Service. Curiosity not encouraged. Just a question now and then in the House of Commons."

Sam replied impressively:

"And how am I to get into the House?"

The Prime Minister named an industrial constituency in the north where a vacancy had just occurred.

"No contest," said he. "You won't be opposed--especially at such a crisis. The Government has the right--"

"No contest?" Sam snorted. "Cready would oppose me--you can lay your shirt on it. He swore to. Ever since that Federation shindy in 1913 he's had his knife into me."

"You'd beat him."

"Perhaps I should. But I should have to carry on a regular campaign, and I couldn't stand it." He spoke with feeling as he imagined to himself all that Cready would say that he would have to answer and couldn't answer, effectively. . . . The Cready hecklers! He saw himself a corpse on the platform, or catching pneumonia--with a heart too feeble to withstand it. "It isn't that I'm a bit afraid of the risks. 'Risks,' I say; ought to say 'certainty.' Not a bit afraid--if any good could come out of it. If men have to die in the trenches, I'm ready enough to die on a platform for the same cause." His voice quavered with genuine patriotism.

"I'm sure of it, Sammy," said Andy, with genuine emotional sympathy. . . . The old Eccles grit!

"But it wouldn't help you much if your candidate kicked the bucket under one of Cready's onslaughts. Now would it?"

The Prime Minister took to walking again. His cigar had vanished.

"I'm very sorry," he murmured thoughtfully, and Sam might have supposed that the great man's sympathy was continuing, had he not added: "Upsets my plans."

"Look here," said Sam. "Why are you set on me? There are others."

"First because you're the best man. And second because you're my colour. You see I have to run a coalition, and the balance has been going against me for a year past. I want somebody of my own party." (The great game!) "Yes, I'm sorry. I don't quite know what to do. I'm being quite frank with you."

"There's one thing you could do."

"What's that?"

"No, you couldn't. It wouldn't be worth while."

"What is it?"

"You might shove me into the Lords. No election. A nice homely sort of place! Club! No oratory! Just conversational. But no! I quite see all the objections to that."

This was Sam's first downright lie in the interview. He saw no sort of objection to it. He stood impartially outside himself and judged the tone in which he had offered the grand suggestion. He could find no fault with it. Indeed, the delivery had been perfect. The Prime Minister was looking through the window at the Horse Guards Parade.

"Yes," mused the Prime Minister under his breath, and then turned round abruptly. "Well, Sam," he said, as it were with stoic resignation. "You know best. I'm sorry. I'm very sorry for both of us. And I hope your case is a bittock less desperate than you think it is. Thanks very much for coming . . . . I say, you won't mind giving us some advice, will you? Come to lunch to-morrow at one forty-five. I want you to back me against the Munitions Secretary, Tom Hogarth, you know him of course! I'm sure you will back me. Of course this is absolutely Masonic." He used a tone of candid, trustful intimacy.

The scene was over.

"I've won," said Sam to himself. "A peerage. Without paying a cent for it. No worry. And I can work just as well for the old country. Better! . . . Have I won?" He was uplifted high. Yes, and women were mere dots on the landscape.

Having walked all the way along the Embankment, and then having found an empty taxi, Sam entered his offices in Bucklersbury, E.C. They were on the first-floor of a typical office-building, massive and granitic as to façade, illustrating the eternal, grim solidity of British business, with twilit, narrow stairs and small rooms inside. Every foot of space was quietly busy with various efforts to do business--each separate, self-regarding, and loftily indifferent to the rest. Forty worlds under one roof. Women passed in and out. Women had risen in the City like a flood, and no compartment was watertight against the flood; they had changed the City, in their humility, their devotion, and their disconcerting critical faculty.

At the pavement stood a handcart of the City Clean Towel Company, which had rendered housekeeping wholesale, and deprived towels of individuality, and sweetened the lives of tens of thousands of clerks, bandits, and plutocrats before lunch. No woman who set eyes on the handcarts of the City Clean Towel Company but was outraged by the horrible, insensitive practicalness of men when left to themselves. Fancy not being able to recognize in a towel an old acquaintance! Fancy using a towel and never seeing it again!

There was no name on the outer door of Raingo's offices. No inhabitant of any of the other offices in the building had ever been in them. They constituted one of the mysteries of the building; but by reason of Sam Raingo's legendary fame they were a source of pride to the building. The clerks' outer room was empty. One typewriter was open with a sheet of paper in it. Three others were in their covers, and had been for years. A forlorn room, festering in its own past. The clerks' inner room, seen through a doorway, was also empty, and had been for years.

The door of Swetnam's room opened, and a tall, thin, sad woman of about thirty-five emerged. She was quite new to Sam, doubtless one of Swetnam's enlistments; old Swetnam seldom kept a clerk for long, and lately Sam had been leaving the control of the office more and more to Swetnam.

"Good morning," said Sam bluffly. "Who are you? The new clerk?" She recognized her employer by his demeanour, and started:

"Yes, sir," she answered timidly.

"What name?"

"Blacklow, sir."

"Well, Miss Blacklow--" He stopped. "Or Mrs.?"

"Mrs., sir."

Probably a war-widow. He must not take the risk of inquiring.

"Well, Mrs. Blacklow, I want you to run out and buy all the French newspapers you can lay your hands on, at once."

"French newspapers," she murmured, puzzled, as though she had never till then realized that the French had newspapers like other folks. "Where shall I get them, sir?"

Sam raised his eyebrows, with conscious desire to make an effect.

"How should I know?" he demanded, acting amazement at such a question. Then he smiled. "All I know is I want all the French newspapers to be had in this city, and I want them immediately. The rest is your affair, surely."

He was not brutal nor unkind; he meant only to vitalize and inspire her. She would have to learn in whose office she was, and the sooner the better. But what was the mentality which, having received an order from the supreme giver of orders, could dream of asking how it was to be executed? In similar circumstances would Miss Packer have sought guidance from Andy? He envied Andy his bright, calm, breakfast-dispensing Miss Packer, and the inferiority of Mrs. Blacklow to Miss Packer made him uncomfortably feel inferior to Andy.

He went smartly into his own rather spacious room. Not a letter, not a document, on the huge, clean, neat desk; desk of an absentee employer who was always expected and never expected. He realized that he had been asleep for five years, and indeed near death from inanition. Once those offices had been filled with clerks often working overtime. Then he had retired in disgust from politics, and the retirement had influenced all his financial activities. He had lost, unknown to almost everyone save Swetnam, considerable sums of money, so that his fortune, though very large, was less than the public imagination credited him with. And, what was more grave, he had lost the touch, the flair, for big buyings, big sellings, mergers, monopolies, spectacular flotations. He had lost it through fear, due to shaken self-confidence. He had been miserable at home. His heart had dismayed him. He had suffered from ennui everywhere.

He was on the way to being an invalid, a disappointed man and a failure in life when the war began. The war hid his failure and did nothing to help him morally or physically. He withdrew from nearly all risks, shut his eyes to all opportunities, and transferred the bulk of his resources to trustee securities, especially British war loan. He behaved nobly in the matter of subscriptions to British war loans. The City admired his behaviour; but nobody in the City could induce him to patronize French loans in London. He turned down all Swetnam's clever proposals for making an honest penny out of the necessities of war. He could, for example, have amassed millions by manipulating shipping interests--and did not. He was like a sick man refusing medicine. Clerk after clerk joined the army or was dismissed. Typewriter after typewriter was covered over; chair after chair was deserted and stood empty. And at length only Swetnam and a woman-clerk remained, and even their duties were a routine.

And first Delphine had stirred his coma, and now Andy Clyth had quickened him suddenly into eager life, and he had found out that his mental faculties, though they had been dormant, were as good as ever, better than ever. Marvellous fine fortune had offered itself, and he had shown the initiative, the enterprise, and the energy to exploit it to the full, to double it, to expand it to bursting. He would put the whole of himself into the Ministry of Records, whether as peer or only as commoner. He would work for the country at war as nobody had, worked. His heart could not affright him. He was ravenous for endeavour. He stretched his limbs symbolically. He was buoyant, exultant, and he rang for Swetnam with gusto.

The bell was no sooner rung than answered. Although "Thos" (as he always signed himself) Swetnam had been shut up in his own room, he had known, by magic, of his employer's arrival on the premises. He carried in his hand some cheques for endorsement, some cheques to sign, and a choice selection of letters for perusal all of which must have been ready waiting in case of the advent of Caesar. Sam gave him a sort of Masonic nod, expressive at once of secret ties, comprehension, and friendliness.

"Good morning, sir," said Swetnam, cheerfully responding to the cheerfulness which he instantly read on Sam's face, but speaking as casually as though Sam came thus to the office every morning, and at the same hour.

"Who's this new woman you've got?"

Swetnam furnished some particulars.

"Widow?"

"I can't say, sir."

"Not a war-widow?"

"I really can't say, sir. But I'm afraid she won't do."

"Now why not?"

"Well, sir, I see she's gone out without telling me."

"I sent her out."

"Yes, sir. But you'd have thought she'd have told me, so that I could have my door open and keep an eye on the outer office." Hostility, nascent but already vigorous, was shown. "I can't have the outer office left empty--especially when you're here."

"Thos, either you're very hard to please, or you're a very bad judge of women. You're always changing 'em."

"I don't know so much about that, sir," said Swetnam, with respectful but uncompromising firmness. "But they aren't so easy to get. And since you've been leaving it to me . . ."

He sat down, exercising a privilege made prescriptive by years of custom. The source of Swetnam's authority was his tremendous, absorbing loyalty to the great institution known as Samuel Raingo. He was somewhat older than Sam, and Sam had inherited him from Raingo Senior. Short, stocky, plump, he looked neat and shabby, and had no distinction either of carriage, voice or speech. He was a common little Cockney, who carefully managed most of his h's, mispronounced nearly all his vowels, put in superfluous r's whenever he saw an opening for them, licked his lips, scratched his head, and walked with a marine roll. His reading was confined to The Daily Mail, The Evening News, The Financial Times, and The Weekly Dispatch. He knew most things about the City, and apparently few things about aught else. When, rarely, he went to the theatre, he "liked a good laugh." He had never heard of Thomas Hardy, Shelley, Beethoven, Wagner, Fielding, Dell, nor Reynolds. But he was acquainted with the names of Shaw, Wells, and Dean Inge, and by a sure instinct disliked them all.

He appeared from nowhere at 9.45 a.m. daily, and disappeared into nowhere at any time from 6 to 8 p.m.--1 to 2 on Saturdays. Between these hours his devotion to the institution was complete. During some of them he actually was the institution. There were people who said that the institution owed everything to him. But, though he had certainly from time to time put very fruitful ideas into Sam's head, and chased some very dangerous ideas out of Sam's head, both he and Sam were well aware that this theory was false. He was worth a thousand a year to the institution, and thought himself well paid with four hundred, to which were added the trifling emoluments of a few secretaryships of small limited companies. It would have been absurd to pay a thousand a year to such a shabby, neat, narrow, and undistinguished man as Tom Swetnam. He could not have carried the salary with dignity.

Withal Tom lived a double life. He was the most steady, uxorious male ever born, had been married twice, and kept the second wife and two strings of children--one still lengthening--in a tiny house and garden at Raynes Park. The wife and the two strings of children and the garden were all perfect, and the most successful of their kind. His youngest son had gained eight ounces and a tooth in the same week as his eldest daughter had won a scholarship at Bedford College. His Glaw dee Deejun roses now and then arrived in the City in Tom's buttonhole, and provided occasions for the expression of Sam's benevolent interest concerning the crowded, remote, and invisible background of Tom's Raingo career.

"How am I for ready money?" Sam asked absently while examining Swetnam's little assortment of papers. "Enough for all purposes?"

"Yes, sir."

"Sure?"

Swetnam offered no reply to this casual insult; both of them knew that he never made an unqualified statement without being sure; he might once a year or so be wrong, but he was always sure.

"Sent that money to Clacton for Mrs. Raingo, didn't you?"

"Yes, sir. I had the acknowledgment of it from the Bank this morning."

Sam, not looking up, held out his right hand. Swetnam rose quickly, unscrewed a fountain-pen, and held it towards the hand, which took it and began to sign Sam's name.

"That's the cheque for--"

"All right! All right! Doesn't matter," Sam said, briskly impatient.

There were mornings, and this was one of them, when he would refuse all attention to detail; when he would sign anything at any cost, or say "Yes" or "No" impulsively, or say "I leave it to you"; when he had to feel free, disburdened, in the shortest possible time. But whereas on other mornings his aim was to be fully idle, to-day he was ardent to concentrate his brain on a new and intoxicating task.

"One moment, sir. You're signing the renunciation form. Aren't you going to take up the new shares you're entitled to?" Sam's hand, holding Swetnam's pen, was over a blue document headed: "Rubber Fields Limited. Issue of new ordinary shares."

"No, I'm not. I shall sell my rights. They ought to be worth--let me see, fifteen or sixteen thousand."

"You might make thirty thousand if you take them up and hold them for a year."

"Possibly. But I won't take them up, Thos. I'm off all risks for the present. Sell the rights."

He signed the renunciation as though breaking a chain. His position was logically untenable, but he maintained it. Swetnam, in silence, watched the wilful casting away of the equivalent of nearly forty years' salary, the price of houses and gardens, the starting in life of dozens of children; and such was the force of tradition and habitual servitude that he did not rebel, nor curse even in his heart.

In a few minutes Sam had dealt with everything and handed the papers and the pen back to his employee.

"Show me the list of companies I'm a director of."

"It's in your 'A' drawer, sir."

"Oh!"

Sam unlocked a drawer, and, extracting a paper therefrom, glanced hastily down the catalogue of the eight or ten minor enterprises from which for some reason or other he had not been able to withdraw his semi-active interest. He scarcely troubled to read their names.

"I shall resign from all of them," he said curtly. "Prepare the letters, will you?" Swetnam said not a word, and moved to leave.

"I say," Sam called him back. "I'm going into the Government."

Swetnam's clumsy, veined face showed no change for a moment. His mental processes were slow; he always read everything through twice; and he admired his employer for nothing more than the ability to grasp the elements of a problem in a single flash. Then he smiled, partly from vicarious pride and partly from relief at finding the key to the enigma of Sam's strange mood; after all, Caesar was not developing insanity.

"A minister, sir?"

"A minister. Records. The Prime Minister sent for me. It'll be no secret after to-morrow."

He spoke just as positively as if the affair had been definitely settled. And of course it had been settled. For if Andy should refuse the peerage, Sam could still--and would--give his weak heart on a charger to Andy and offer, out of patriotism and a determination to help the Government at any cost, to accept the perils of a contested election and all other perils whatsoever. His whole attitude, his intentions, his exhilaration assumed that the affair was definitely settled.

It was not Sam's ambition that was to be fulfilled, but Swetnam's. The thick, little, common old man was more exhilarated than Sam himself. To-morrow--the tremendous news in that house at Raynes Park! Swetnam was too happy to live. But Swetnam, in addition to being a worshipper, was a realist. He had the gift of seeing Caesar as Caesar actually was. He worshipped him, while taking account of all his clearly-seen defects and limitations.

"Will there have to be much public speaking, sir?"

Sam was startled and had to recover himself. He knew that Swetnam was not hinting at anxiety for the ministerial heart. The worshipper's concern had to do with Sam's extremely mediocre talent for public speaking. Sam was excellently fluent and effective in conversation; he could be admirable at a directors' meeting; but at a meeting of shareholders he was a quite different man, and a worse. He had sometimes made himself wonderfully ridiculous in public. For he could not stand and talk loud and keep his wits. Swetnam's tone helped Sam to realise clearly for the first time that in trying for a peerage he had been thinking at least as much of this disability as of his heart.

"There will not," Sam snapped bravely, and with finality.

But he was disturbed and temporarily thrown down from his self-complacency. He had a spasm of alarm.

"Oh! It's you!" said Swetnam as he opened the door to leave the presence. Mrs. Blacklow was just coming in. Swetnam paused, as if to take charge of the woman himself.

"That'll be all, thank you, Mr. Swetnam," Sam said. He was not going to have this taking charge of anybody or anything in his room.

"Thank you, sir." Thos departed with a grand dignity intended to overpower his enemy the clerk, who, however, through negligence or nervousness missed it all.

"Well?" Sam began.

The woman's shabbily-gloved hands were empty.

"I thought of going to Dax's, sir," she said in her weak, uninteresting voice, and then stopped; she had evidently been hurrying and was a little out of breath.

"Well, Dax's wasn't a bad scheme. So you went to Dax's. Well, you went to Dax's. And what happened at Dax's?"

He had been ready to show severity at the sight of her empty hands. But her demeanour proved her to be a hopeless case of incompetence, and moreover he had obviously inspired her with fright; so that he was content to banter.

"They hadn't got any French papers. They had Italian and Spanish, but they said no French papers had arrived since the day before yesterday. They had one old one."

"Which was it?"

"I didn't ask, sir."

"Why didn't you? I told you I wanted all the French papers."

"I thought--"

"That's just what you didn't do. Did you try anywhere else?"

"No, sir. I thought as Dax's said that, it wouldn't be any use me--"

"You go and make a fresh start. And remember exactly what I said--'all the French newspapers in this city.'"

She had no capability, no style, no attraction, no energy. Swetnam was right; she would have to seek another situation. Why did such women exist? They weren't even worth being sorry for. He hated her being afraid of him; and yet he liked it.

Instead of going forth and making a fresh start, she sat down on a chair, Swetnam's chair. At this unparalleled breach of office decorum Mr. Raingo really did begin to think that something strange and disastrous had happened to the very structure of society. Never before had a clerk sat in his presence without being asked to do so; he had had women stenographers who even took shorthand-notes while standing.

He did not know how to act for the best. Then he noticed that Mrs. Blacklow had turned pale, and it was suddenly he, not she, who was afraid. He glanced aside uneasily to see if the carafe of water was in its place on the mantelpiece.

"I'm all right," she murmured, reading his thought with disturbing insight. But he poured out some water for her.

The scene between them was now transformed. The structure of society was made whole again. And Mr. Raingo perceived by a revelation that Mrs. Blacklow had charm after all. She had the charm of weakness, of inefficiency, of passivity. She was made not to do, but to be done unto; to receive, and to give nothing in return; for she had not beauty--she had only an appealing, pathetic weakness. And her youthfulness was but relative; a man would have to be twenty years older than herself to regard her as young. She put the glass down on the desk, spilling some of the water on the green leather. She seemed to have blossomed feebly under his ministration; she was taking her place in the world.

"Have you ever been a clerk before?" he asked mildly, in the way of reassuring conversation.

"Oh, yes, sir. Before I got married, I had a lot of situations." He smiled to himself. She was just the sort of clerk who would naturally have a lot of situations, possessing no ability to keep any situation.

"Your husband--where is he?"

"He's all right, sir. He was taken prisoner in 1916."

Mr. Raingo thought of Geoffrey. Geoffrey would be a bond between them.

"My son is a prisoner too--since 1916 too," he said.

"Yes, sir."

"Safe, anyway."

"Yes, sir."

"Any children?"

"No, sir. But I'm going to have one." She spoke quite evenly and calmly in her flaccid voice.

"But I thought you said--1916."

She raised her eyes and gazed steadily at him, and his own gaze shifted away from her candour.

Faithless woman! Light woman! Wicked woman! Her husband fights and suffers for his country, and she--Mr. Raingo's reflections, however, did not in the least run on these lines. He was thinking with wonder, and also with soft pleasure, that some man had found her desirable, had courted her, kissed her into surrender. She would surrender simply, from a talent for acquiescence and witlessness, not from passion or carnality.

He was flattered that she had told him. There must be something in his manner, something unconscious and profound that she liked and trusted, and that had triumphed over her fear of him. He had suspected the existence of such a quality before. Never would she have confessed to Swetnam. .

She had a child within her as she sat there in front of him. Millions and millions of expectant mothers on earth, and yet each one was separately miraculous, imposing, confounding, majestic.

"What sort of a father?"

"I only know his name, sir. He was a lodger in the house on ten days' leave. . . . He went back."

"How--er--soon will it be?"

"About six months, sir."

Good God! Only three months ago and she was the prize, the prey, the ravished, the bride, all soft and yielding. And now she was sitting gloved and hatted in front of him. And he had been harrying her about newspapers. . . . And he had never spoken to her in his life before. He realized overwhelmingly the meaning of war, and felt that he was realizing it for the first time. This was the meaning of war. The meaning of war was within her . . . . One man fast in the arid routine of a prison-camp; the other in a trench under fire. She had no home, only a lodging. The child ruthlessly, implacably growing, growing. And at the end of the war she would have to face the released prisoner, with the child. If the child did not die. Another woman, desperate, might kill the child or herself. But Mrs. Blacklow would be incapable of any such deed. She must wish that the war would last for ever. And he, Samuel Raingo, was making the war into politics and intrigue. He was not aghast at his conduct, for he perfectly understood that politics and intrigue are the inevitable accompaniment, as well as in part the cause, of war. But he was deeply affected by the contrast between the two aspects of war, as shown in himself and in her. He became a speechless poet for a few minutes.

"Have you got any money?"

"Only what I earn, sir."

"But you can't stay either here or anywhere else for very long."

"No, sir."

"Well, I think you'd better leave at the end of next month. Give me your address. I'll see you through--so far as money's concerned, I mean." The money would be the tribute of politics to tragedy.

She did not speak; she scarcely wept, but she did weep a little. Then the officious, inquisitive, restless Swetnam poked his nose in at the door. Of course he was wondering what the new clerk might be doing so long in the boss's room, without a notebook. The fellow was as jealous as a woman in love. But Swetnam said:

"Mrs. Raingo is here, sir."

Sam controlled himself. Only two days earlier Adela had said and repeated that nothing would induce her to come to London in the spring. And here she was! Always incalculable, unpredictable! Unless of course you went by the rule that if she had said she would not do a thing she would do it, and vice versa. She had a trick of "turning up" like a terrier. Sam loved to have a clear, definite programme for himself, and to keep to it; and he loved those with whom he was regularly in contact to have a clear, definite programme also, and to keep to it. He wanted always "to know where he was." But he could never know where he was with Adela. No doubt she had been wondering what could be the result of the Prime Minister's telegram, and the casual notion of strolling up to London to find out had occurred to her. He rose from the chair rather violently. He had the sensation of being wrenched violently out of one world into a very different world. Not surprising that he had to control himself and collect his wits

Mrs. Blacklow, leaving, deferentially stood aside for Mrs. Raingo in the doorway--and then vanished. What was the difference between those two women? Adela was nearly as badly dressed and just as inefficient as the clerk, and perhaps just as unreliable. Nor had she more charm than the clerk; he was inclined to think that she had less charm. Yet the difference was enormous; for Adela was active, and she had authority. She was not entitled, by anything she had done, to possess authority, but she had it. He felt her authority. Put her in sacking, with rope for a waistband, and she would still have authority--and look, too, as if she had it.

"Hello, Adela!" he greeted her, and waited for the impact.

"Who was that?" she asked.

"A new clerk."

"Wears gloves, does she, at work?"

Odd remark, and how characteristic! There was no innuendo in it, for Adela was very straightforward; but it disturbed and slightly offended him; it showed an instinctive, hard antipathy to the poor creature. Should he tell her the poor creature's story? Emphatically no! She would not understand, or she would refuse to understand; she would say something dry and odious; she would tarnish the story. He would keep the story strictly to himself; it should be his alone.

Adela came close to him and kissed him. Her kiss had a new quality, faintly emotional. Ah! She was excited about his prospects! The snob in her was anticipating a brilliant rise--for both of them, was awaiting the moment when she would be able to say to her friends with a new pride: "My husband!" He accepted her arrival with forced resignation, but his spirit withdrew from her into the recesses of his being.

"What train did you come by?" he inquired, looking at his watch.

"I motored, dear."

"Oh! I thought your car was out of order."

"I came in yours--I knew you wouldn't mind."

"Who drove you? You surely haven't brought Wrenkin--"

"I drove myself. I'm a much better driver than Wrenkin."

"Good heavens!" He sat down. He was silenced. She was always ramming her own car into gate-posts and trees and things.

"Do you mean to say you drove all through the East End and into the City?"

"Why not? The car's outside now. I thought it might be handy for you if you should happen to want it in London."

The woman was unique. In another moment she would be saying that she had brought the car to London solely in his interests and that he ought to be glad he had such a thoughtful wife! She went on eagerly in her high voice, and her grey eyes for once were looking at him and not through him.

"Oh, Sam, it's about Geoffrey--I had a letter this morning from--"

"Geoffrey!" An absolutely new vista of conjecture opened before him. She was going to be right again, to justify her caprice in some quite unforeseen manner. He even had a feeling of guilt towards her.

"I had a letter from Jim Hylton's sister-in-law--"

"Who's Jim Hylton?" He sharply pulled her up a second time.

"You know Jim Hylton."

"I don't."

"He was taken prisoner with Geoffrey and they've been together."

"Oh, that fellow!"

"Bertha says Jim's escaped and he's just reached London.

"He and Geoffrey escaped together. They separated because it was safer. That's why we haven't been hearing from Geoffrey. So we may expect him any time." She stood over Sam, sparkling with vitality.

"If he's got clear away," said he glumly. He was startled, thrilled, but determined not openly to share his wife's eager excitement.

"I'm sure if Jim Hylton could get clear away Geoffrey would."

What an argument! How like a woman! How like a mother!

"You've never met Hylton. Neither have I." He knew that he was behaving like a curmudgeon and that there was no excuse for such behaviour. But she exasperated him.

"I know I haven't. But I know all about him, dearest." She was unruffled, marvellously nice. Most annoyingly she had set him an example in good manners, but she was always doing that. He scorned her for assuming that what Jim Hylton had done Geoffrey could do. Yet he himself was aware of a secret, deep, illogical conviction to the same effect.

"Better," said he thoughtfully, with a calculated, disingenuous air of solemn warning. "Better if the boy hasn't got away. He'd only be punished then. But if he's got away he'll have to fight again, and you never know what may happen." Cruel! True! But nevertheless very cruel, at such a moment! Horribly brutal!

"Oh, Sam! You oughtn't to talk like that," she remonstrated bravely, throwing back her head with resilient dignity. But she was not dashed. Nothing could lower her expectant joy at the impending sight of her son.

Sam gazed doggedly at blotting-paper.

"Why am I behaving like this?" he reflected. Adela was the mother all afresh, just as she had been long ago when she was desirable, desired. Hanged if she wasn't the wife afresh also. Their old friendly intimacy! He recalled it, but he could not rekindle the spent ashes of it.

"Well, perhaps I oughtn't," he said, relenting a little, in shame.

They talked and arranged a lunch.

"Well, I'm going on to Bertha Hylton's now, but of course I had to tell you first."

"Now do for God's sake take care of yourself in the traffic," he enjoined her as she was leaving.

She savoured his interest in her safety. She was gone. Not a word from her as to the meaning of the Prime Minister's telegram! She had completely forgotten it. And yet in a week she might, through no virtue of her own, be a baroness. How she would gloat over a title!

Sam said to himself, in a sudden whirl of emotion:

"If the kid does get back safe, damned if I don't wangle him out of the active service list and into my Ministry! Damned if I don't! Unless I'm mistaken there are one or two jobs there he could do jolly well."

The next day Miss Packer waylaid Mr. Raingo on the stairs of the Prime Minister's official residence. In appearance, mood, and demeanour she was exactly the same as on the previous morning. She seemed to be immune from all the influences which hourly cause subtle changes in the functioning of the human organism; she was a woman, but above womanhood; and her baffling blandness made an invisible adamantine wall between herself and the world.

"The Prime Minister will see you privately after lunch in my room," said she. "It's along here."

She took him along a corridor, into a small room full of books orderly on shelves and books disorderly on the floor.

"I see," said Sam. "Straight through and first on the right. And am I supposed to slip out and come here on my own?" He added, moved by her uncompromisingly unhumorous nice smile to correct the colloquialism: "Initiative?" You might use such a locution as "on my own" to the Prime Minister, but not to a Miss Packer--at any rate not to a Miss Packer on duty.

"Please."

"And then wait here?"

"Please."

He wanted to say: "And shall you be here to keep me company?" But her inflexible decorum had cowed him. To trifle might be to alienate her, and he had not yet gauged the extent of her power.

"It shall be done," he said, with earnest gravity.

"They are all here," she said. "The Cabinet meeting finished earlier than was expected."

"The hell it did!" he thought coarsely. "I wonder if anything would happen if one fell at her feet in a limousine and offered her enough pearls and a flat in Park Lane. But the Queen of Spain has no legs." The ribald result, no doubt, of mere nervousness on his part.

"Mr. Samuel Raingo," announced his friend the butler at the dining-room door, to reach which he had been ushered through an ante-room and a small drawing-room. Six men, including Andrew Clyth, were standing on or near the hearth-rug, between the fire and the table. They turned to look at him, with the frank curiosity of schoolboys. He knew them all except one.

"Permit me, Prime Minister," said the Earl of Ockleford, tall, white, obese, stately (his was the only frock-coat in the room), putting an ash-tray neatly under the perilous long ash of Andy's cigarette.

This tiny incident saved Sam from a mistake of deportment. He had meant boldly to address Andy as "Andy." But he now perceived in an instant that, whatever Andy might be at breakfast, at lunch he was a great personage, one of the greatest in the world, the old sinner!

"Morning, Prime Minister," he began deferentially.

Andy, tossing a gracious nod of thanks to the Earl, stepped forward and greeted him with warm, urbane patronage.

"You know everybody here, I expect." And looking round: "You all know my old friend Sam Raingo."

Sam shook hands with Tom Hogarth, in a lounge suit, short, bald, blond, and challenging, Minister of Munitions; Hasper Clews in a morning-coat, tall, dark, iron-grey, melancholy, shy, Chancellor of the Exchequer; Sid Jenkin, black, broad, shabby, canny, easily genial, Labour M.P. and Minister without Portfolio; and the magnificent Lord Ockleford, Lord President of the Council. The sixth man, to whom Sam had to be presented, was a Colonial Premier in military uniform, whose greeting was as punctilious as the Earl's and as genial as Sid Jenkin's.

Raingo was nervous; and, after the manner of nervous people at a party in a strange environment, he seemed to examine the sombre ill-lit room with interest and in detail, though he was not interested in it at all and scarcely saw what he was looking at. He noticed vaguely the collection of portraits, sadly mediocre, of former Prime Ministers, on the walls, and a view of a courtyard through the windows, and no more. The party sat down to meat. The Prime Minister took one end of the huge table, without giving directions to his guests. Sid Jenkin planted himself at the other end of the table, opposite the Prime Minister. Hogarth, the Munitions Minister, and gloomy Clews, the Chancellor, sat on the side to the right of the Prime Minister, and the Colonial Premier and the fine old Earl on the side to the left. One chair remained between Sid Jenkin and the Earl, and Sam modestly slipped into it.

The service was terribly slow. Sam felt his nervousness increasing. He knew that he was there to be inspected, vetted, and. probably put through his paces. Or was it really, after all, that they only wanted his advice, as Andy had said? In any case he must bear himself in a style to demonstrate that he was an eminently suitable candidate for the red benches of the House of Lords. The chat drooped, and Sam suddenly comprehended that if he was nervous, his presence was making the others nervous. This conclusion stiffened him and gave him heart.

"What a pack!" he thought, knowing that the derogatory appellation was unfair to some of them. "What a pack!"

He remembered each occasion in the past when two or three of them, by the arrogance of curt nods and supercilious greetings, had made him humiliatingly feel the great gulf that separates a minister, any minister, from a private member of the House. Quite possibly that very morning they had been discussing him at length, freely, cruelly, with jibes. Let them. There was not one among them who did not envy him his wealth, reckoning it doubtless three times greater than it in fact was. (But this was a common thought with him, and a continual source of satisfaction and inspiration.)

And as for the peerage, well, he admitted that a peerage would give him immense pleasure. And why not? The prestige of lordship was still enormous. Here and there one among the pack would disdainfully smile at the notion of taking a peerage: such as Andy and Tom Hogarth: but only because it would mean banishment from the Commons, where careers lay. In old age, however, when the Commons had got beyond their dwindling powers to dominate it, they would accept a peerage fast enough, and a peerage of the higher orders, on some self-justifying political pretext or other. They always did. He knew that he was again being unfair to some of them. But all judgments with a tang in them have to be a little unfair. He caught Andy's eye.

"Prime Minister," he said clearly, inspired, and contradicting the deference of tone with an Eccles glance, "is there anybody among our friends who has specialized about prisoners?"

"Jenkin," Tom Hogarth flashed out, his face a large smile. "He's done time."

A general hearty laugh.

"And proud of it, Tommy! And 'ere I'm sitting at this table at No. 10 to-day!"

Nothing pleased Sid Jenkin better than a reference to the weeks he had spent in prison, in his fiery youth, apropos of some petty defiance of the police in a strike.

"I meant prisoners-of-war," Sam explained.

"That'll still be Jenkin," said the Prime Minister. "Jenkin is our leading authority on the Swiss organization for the welfare of prisoners-of-war."

"Yes, I'm your man," Sid agreed invitingly.

"I've a son who's escaped, and I'm very anxious to find out what's happened to him," Sam said gravely. "I haven't heard. He may have been caught, but I know he got clear away." Sam of course was genuinely anxious about Geoffrey's fate, but at the same time he joyously realized that he had made good capital politically out of Geoffrey.

The table appeared interested, impressed, and sympathetic to the father and appreciative of the son. To the glamour of the father's riches had been added the distinction of being the only man there with a son who had had the grit and the resource to escape out of the hands of the Boche. Also the whole table was delivered from its nervous constraint.

"Good for your boy!" cried Tom Hogarth, smacking the cloth. "No, I'll have beer," he said loudly to the butler.

Sid Jenkin at once assumed possession of Sam in a private duologue, wrote down details of regiment, dates, places, swore he would set the cable to work that afternoon, stated again and again that he 'ad the entire organization at 'is finger-ends; was exceedingly amiable.

(" I am going to be a minister and a peer," thought Sam.)

With his right ear Sam heard Tom Hogarth, at the distant other end of the table, describing at length to the Prime Minister and the Colonial Premier and whoever might care to listen how in 1899 he too had been a prisoner-of-war and how he too had escaped; he was excited and dramatic, and throughout the tale he ate plenteously in big gulps and quaffed beer.

Then the Colonial Premier quietly reminded people that he too in the same year 1899 had been taken prisoner and had escaped--from the British. He spoke very smoothly, very benevolently, understating and using no gestures. Tom Hogarth challenged him, across the attentive, enigmatic Prime Minister, on a point of the treatment of prisoners-of-war in those barbaric days. Tom grew more strenuous; the Colonial Premier grew more gentle. The argument went on and on.

"I'll lay you a hundred guineas, sir," cried Tom. The "sir" was addressed to the general in the Colonial Premier.

"Tom," laughed the Prime Minister, "you know that the general never bets--neither do I. We leave gambling to the upper and lower classes, don't we, Christian?"

"But, really, sir . . . Ockleford shall decide. He knows everything, so he must know this."

"What precisely is the question, my dear boy?" asked the Earl, who was Tom's father's cousin.

By this time Sid Jenkin had obtained all his particulars and made all his promises, and the topic of Geoffrey was closed.

"Wonderful 'ow Tommy hates Colonials," murmured Sid very low. "'E's given our friend the name of 'stroking Jesus.'"

"Why?" asked Sam. And then: "I see."

The general, speaking to the Earl, was tenderly stroking the Earl's arm.

"Jealousy," continued Sid. "That's what it is. Jealousy. And Tom's got no use either for any of us ministers without portfolios. He told me so last night when 'e'd had a drop. 'Sid,' 'e said, 'all you fellows'--there's three of us, Hempton ain't 'ere-'ye're only passengers, dust in the eyes of the public,' 'e says. 'I don't mind you,' 'e says and 'e doesn't. 'But we don't need any of those backwoods dagos to teach us 'ow to run a war,' 'e says. But what rings the bell with me--it isn't as I'm in the War Cabinet, though that's something as'll be remembered in the history of the Labour movement; it's that the Secretary for War isn't, and the First Lord of the Admiralty isn't, in the War Cabinet." He laughed inaudibly and winked. "Of course they says there's six of us in the War Cabinet; but really there's only two, Tommy Hogarth and the P.M. They're as jealous of one another as two cornet players in a brass band, but the P.M. can't do without Tommy. Some say," he went on murmuring into Sam's ear. "Some say if there's two members of the War Cabinet, it isn't Andrew Clyth and Tom Hogarth--it's Andrew Clyth and Andrew Clyth." He grinned. "But that isn't so. Tom's on the map all right."

"Well, at any rate, you all seem very cheerful together," Sam breathed, thinking of Flanders, Amiens, the Channel coast, German prison camps, and adulterous expectant mothers.

"Well, things are better. It's not generally known yet, but things are better. We know that Foch is satisfied. At least 'e isn't satisfied yet, but 'e expects to be in a day or two. All this man-power business--the Bill and so on--gallery stuff! We started it in a panic and now we've got to go on with it. Biggest piece of political camouflage ever attempted, the Man-Power Bill is. Still, it'll give the Boche something to think about."

"Quite," Sam concurred; his spirits were much raised; but he was wondering whether to feel flattered by Sid Jenkin's confidences or to condemn Sid for a general chatterer. He knew that Sid always chattered--sometimes in a most misleading manner. Still, it would be a nice thing if you couldn't chatter to a guest of what was practically a confidential meeting of the War Cabinet. . . . On the whole he would defend Sid's reassuring loquacity. He spoke, louder, of the morning bulletin--the Prime Minister was eyeing them. Sid, too, had noticed that suspecting, uneasy glance.

"I fear I must decide against you, my dear boy." Lord Ockleford had delivered judgment, whereat the Colonial Premier bowed his thanks.

A general laugh, in which Hogarth himself was a principal performer; but Hogarth's mirth had something savage in it.

"I suppose cheerfulness is a virtue," said the taciturn and hypochondriacal Hasper Clews in his plaintive, rather quavering tone, full of implications, mild rebuke, and sinister irony.

He was eight years younger than the Prime Minister and looked a couple of years older. Except Sid Jenkin and Hogarth, he was the youngest man present, but his unconscious attitude to the table was that of an uncle to nephews. The table waited for him to continue; he said no more; he had obtained his effect.

Raingo noticed that thereupon everybody, even the Prime Minister, seemed to brace himself, to recall the sense of terrific responsibilities, and to realize the nature of the consequences, personal and general, of failure to do the job set by fate. Each face grew sterner, more authoritative, more intelligent, a worthier mirror of the national reputation of the man behind it. And Sam's mind was suddenly filled with visions of the dazzling, dramatic annals of the careers around him. Clews had risen from the son of a Nonconformist professor of theology in a minor college to be the getter and the dispenser of millions of money per day. Sid Jenkin had worked in a coalmine, fought in sanguinary riots, quelled multitudes of his fellow-men with nothing but oratory for a weapon, and was now the head of his party and a right honourable. The Colonial Premier in his youth had commanded armies in the field against desperate odds, and then made a nation out of defeat. Lord Ockleford had been the vice-regal centre and most splendid figure in Oriental pageants of sovereignty surpassing everything else in Asiatic history. Tom Hogarth had reigned in seven departments of State, fought, written, and fought; he was the most brilliant advocate in the House, and one of the finest polemical and descriptive writers in the country; he had every gift except common sense, and he could rise victorious even from the disasters imposed upon him by an incurable foolishness.

As for Andy, Sam had known him too well in youth ever to judge him impartially in middle-age. He was as great a prizefighter as Hogarth himself, but his method was that of infighting. He mystified Sam, who could not divine how he came to be where he was. A miraculous adroitness, a unique genius for chicane, beneath a nervous and apparently trustful and candid manner! That was what it must be.

Sam considered himself the equal of any of them. He had done wonderful things. But after all he was only a millionaire and a man of business, whereas the others had the incomparable prestige which in Britain attaches to politics alone. In politics he had failed--no doubt chiefly because he could not move multitudes by word of mouth. But now he was going to succeed in politics. Once again he had the feeling of intense exhilaration.

"I don't see much reason for optimism myself," Hasper Clews at last proceeded.

"Great Heavens!" Tom Hogarth burst out. "Haven't we heard this morning that Guatemala is about to declare war on Germany! What do you want?" Pleased with himself, Tom chuckled, looking round the table. But the smiles were restrained.

Clews pecked at the starch-free bread which he always carried with him, and went on in bland gloom:

"Of course I know the generals are optimistic. But so far as I remember the generals always have been optimistic. I should like a few sound civilians to be optimistic."

"There are some who are," Lord Ockleford put in.

"Well, that's the best news I've heard for a long time," said Clews with a grim smile. "The Paris press doesn't strike me as very optimistic, really! . . . My daughter's been teaching me to read French in the evenings."

"Stout fellow!" exclaimed the irrepressible Tom. "I suppose you thought somebody here besides Ockleford ought to know a bit of French, eh?"

"The French press from what I 'ear--" Sid Jenkin began.

"Raingo's got a new way for dealing with the Paris press," said the Prime Minister. "But perhaps we oughtn't to speak of it out loud." He looked at Sam as if to say: "Here's your opening."

"I quite agree with you, Clews," Sam opened immediately, thankful that he had spent the previous evening examining several files of French papers at the Club. He knew that every eye was upon him and every brain waiting to assess him. "Without actually saying so, the Paris press have been hinting, or have been made to hint, that it might be difficult to keep both Paris and the Channel ports--Calais and Boulogne, that is--and that Paris must be saved at any cost. Pleasing! . . . . I call that pessimism if you like!"

"But if you had to choose, wouldn't it be better to keep Paris?" asked the Colonial Premier. "I say, if you had to make a choice."

"No!" roared the irrepressible Tom. "They've abandoned Paris once. Why shouldn't they again?"

"I look at it like this," said Sam judicially, glancing across Lord Ockleford with deference at the Colonial Premier. "The Paris problem is mainly psychological. The Channel ports problem is military, or rather naval, and I think on the whole more important. I think if you had to give up Calais and Boulogne you'd give up the anti-submarine barrage across the narrows and the value of every Boche submarine--I mean its destructive value--would be at least doubled. And it's four times as far to Havre. That would mean many more of our submarines needed to convoy our transports, and three or four times as much transport tonnage into the bargain--just now when we have to lend every ship we can lay hold of for American transport. And I don't say anything about the risk of Kent being invaded, or about Big Berthas being trained on Dover. The war would have been finished by this time if we'd stuck to the Belgian coast. To give that up was a capital mistake. And to give up the coast of the narrows would be still worse. The French have never grasped the naval question. Foch hasn't. Whenever they feel themselves in a real hole their instinct is to do something silly about the sea. And when they show signs of being silly it's a sure thing they're pessimistic at bottom--or even thoroughly rattled. I quite see the importance of Paris, but that's how I look at it, sir."

"Quite!" admitted the Colonial Premier, with respect.

"All that's academic," said the irrepressible curtly. "We shan't have to give up either."

Nevertheless Sam had been effective; and, with that curious naive expression which came over his face sometimes, the Prime Minister glanced about saying with his poetic eye: "Hear the man I've chosen. Hear him."

Sam gave attention to his food; the closing stages of the meal were now at hand. He said to himself that he was in a queer sort of menagerie, but after all it was no queerer than his considerable experience of the world had led him to expect. Were those the men who ran the war, men whose names filled the newspapers daily and were known to every citizen, the men who went about like gods in the departments, conscious of the reality of power? Well, they were. Only now they were not talking about what they were thinking about. Each brain held a crowded mass of details, problems, responsibilities, ever present to the secret consciousness. To know them, to appreciate their talents, you would have to be invisible and watch them at grips with their tasks, dealing with men and digesting material, balancing pros and cons, making decisions. Now they were merely relaxing, or showing off, which indeed was a favourite form of relaxation with some people. The Prime Minister was certainly brooding upon the speech which in less than two hours he would have begun in a crowded and frightened and perhaps hysterical House. Sid Jenkin, Clews and Tom Hogarth had somehow involved themselves in a discussion concerning the censorship, and Sam for a few moments was isolated.

"Your place is in north Essex, I think," said Lord Ockleford, pale and puffy, turning to him with majestic polished courtesy, and at once broaching the topic of shorthorns. He remembered, far better than Sam, the characteristics and price of a pedigree bull which Sam had sold in somewhat sensational circumstances in 1914. He had theories about breeding, about pasturage, about the value of cattle-shows and the bases of judging. It was impossible not to assume that his lordship had spent the whole of a busy life in the study of pedigree stock. Withal he was most modest, attitudinising with exquisite grace before Sam as a tyro before a master. And throughout Sam was following the discussion about the censorship.

"I say the paper ought to be suppressed," Tom Hogarth was urging passionately. "I don't care what the paper is. I said so this morning and I shall stick to it. The offices ought to be taken possession of this afternoon. Here the damned rag deliberately defies the censorship and publishes important military information--and nothing is to be done! It's an end to discipline, and discipline is the very life-blood of war." His eyes blazed; yet he was smiling as well as smacking the table.

"What does Raingo say?" asked the Prime Minister, with marked quietness of tone. The question was a command. Sam had to withdraw from shorthorns, and Tom Hogarth had to stop in mid-course.

"Well, Prime Minister," Sam began, and hesitated, looking Hogarth in the face and then looking round the room; the servants had gone.

"I was particularly anxious to get your views, Sam," Andy encouraged him.

"To me," Sam took a line, "to me the thing turns on the psychology of the military caste. You set a general an impossible task in extremely dangerous circumstances, and then you hit him over the head because he fails in it. He's bound to have defenders, and big ones. These articles are simply the revenge of the whole military class."

"We had to set him the task. The French--"

"That's beside the point. You set it. Anybody with an ounce of nous can see that the articles are absolutely true and can't be contradicted. There's only one thing for you to do. Stick it. Leave the paper alone. Why, if the British Government were to suppress a wealthy London Tory military paper, the affair would cause more stir than a hundred thousand dead on a battle-field--throughout the entire world! Everyone would say you were dithering with fright; it would be worth an army-corps to Germany. It isn't as if you could undo the mischief that's been done--if any. You can't."

Hogarth repeated, smacking, and red in the face:

"What I say is, discipline is discipline."

"Not always. Sometimes it's lunacy," said Sam calmly.

A pause. The outsider had at the worst demonstrated that he was not dithering.

"As I said in 1917," Sid Jenkin filled the pause. "You may remember, Tom, I--"

"You said a lot of things in 1917 that are best forgotten, Sid, my lad. I maintain that a lamentable lack of--er--cohesion is being shown."

"Well, if it's cohesion, we're talking about I 'ad some particulars last night about your Ministry, Tommy," said Sid, winking at Sam. "I 'ear you gave a permit to the seller to sell some engineering plant at Newcastle to a buyer, and refused the permit to the buyer to buy. That's cohesion, is it?"

"Childish!" Tom Hogarth shouted, furious at last. "My Ministry's the best run Ministry in the Government." The episode seemed to Sam symbolic.

"They all hate one another worse than they hate the Boche," he thought, unfairly but picturesquely. The Prime Minister was the trainer of the menagerie and some of the wild beasts were defying him: that was it.

Sam waited for Andy's gesture; it was masterly. The Prime Minister looked at his watch. Tom Hogarth jumped up savagely, raised his massive shoulders to his ears, and strode towards the window. When he turned round he was humorously chuckling. Lord Ockleford spoke a courteous word of optimism to Sam about the chances of the escaped prisoner, and Sam, really pleased, thanked him with all the urbanity which he used to employ in the old days towards large shareholders in a not too prosperous company. He felt that he had been misjudging the Earl for many years.

Miss Packer was not in her room, into which Sam slipped with the illusion that he was taking part in some bustling light comedy of chicane. There must, he thought, be a good deal of careful and exact fore-planning in that house. A singular room. Besides the books it had a large easy chair, an office chair, and a very small typewriting table with a portable typewriter, a letter-basket (empty), a calendar of engagements, and one notebook thereon. Evidently, under Miss Packer, there must be a clerk who did, elsewhere, the routine work of personal secretaryship.

Sam glanced at the books. Those on the ordered shelves were calf-bound volumes such as no gentleman's library should be without, and such as no gentleman reads--complete sets of works by authors who have passed through the purgatory of criticism into a heaven of undisturbed nullity. The books strewn about were modern, and chiefly novels signed by Frankau, Hutchinson, Sabatini, Oppenheim, etc. etc., together with a Library of Standard Literature, in ten tomes of gilt cloth.

"Her robust taste!" said Sam, who had some notion of the difference between books and books. But, opening several of the strewn volumes, he found them all inscribed on the inside covers, "Andrew Clyth" or "A. C." The Prime Minister caught him stooping at his investigations.

"Well, Sam, I've shown you the lid off, eh?"

"You have, Andy."

Andy seemed to be at his most genial, candid and sympathetic; nevertheless his yellowish, roving eyes had now the covert, inquiring look which was so marked at the previous day's breakfast, but which he had somehow put off for the Cabinet lunch.

"Now listen here, Sammy," he began in the best hearty Ecclesian vein, "we're very old friends--let's be frank with one another."

Both men were standing. Andy was appreciably the taller, and Sam did not like the lanky fellow to be looking down at him

"Certainly," said Sam. "You don't mind me sitting down, do you? Standing's not very good for me."

"My dear boy! Please!" Andy smiled eagerly, showing his bright teeth; but the suggestion had somehow twisted his opening.

Sam took the easy chair and crossed his legs.

"We want you. You are just the man we do want, and we don't want anybody else. But we can't have you in the upper House. You must be in the Commons. I'll see that you're spared in every possible way. There can't be any serious trouble in the Commons, but a question or two might arise from time to time, as I said yesterday; such questions must be answered in the Commons, and of course you'd be able to answer them quite easily. As for the by-election, if there's a contest--I don't think for a moment there will be--you shall have the best help I can give. You know, old chap, we all think you're exaggerating a bit about the state of your health. Natural! Natural! Prudence is always best. I know I'm a little fussy myself. But one can take one's health too seriously. Forgive me if I'm carrying frankness too far." Sam said nothing. "In any case, if you really are decided you can't go back to the Commons--then I must approach our second choice at once, and I shall be damned sorry to have to do it."

"Are you bluffing? I think you are," said Sam to himself, lolling in his chair. From the easy chair he could regard Andy's height with equanimity.

Then aloud, quietly:

"I entirely understand. But you may believe me I've not been exaggerating. It isn't that I'm worrying personally about my health. As I said yesterday, I don't mind cracking up in a crisis. What troubles me is that my cracking up would be a great nuisance to you. Moreover I should almost certainly go under before I had time even to begin. So we'll call it off. All I'll say is, it was awfully decent of you to ask me."

The Prime Minister made no reply. Sam was thrilled with the elated joy of a tussle. He sat erect. He leaned forward, confidentially, and continued in an intimate half-boyish tone:

"I'm not being quite frank with you, Andy. I feel I must be. It's my wife. My wife won't let me go through an election. She won't let me go into the House of Commons. I was afraid she wouldn't."

"Your wife! What precisely does she say?"

"Oh, you know what women are. What she says doesn't matter."

"Tell me."

"Precisely?"

"Yes."

"Well, about my health she says all that I say, and a lot more. About the politics of the affair she says that obviously I'm the chap you need. She says I'm a first-rate business man, and I belong to your party, and I've some inside acquaintance with the press and so on. She says peerages are cheap to-day, and there's no good reason why I shouldn't have one. She says you don't want to give me one because you've always been jealous of me, ever since we were boys, and that sort of jealousy will influence even the biggest men. She says if I'm only in the Commons you can get rid of me as soon as my work is done and you'll have nothing further to fear from me. Whereas if I'm in the Lords you can never get rid of me, and I might make a name there, and you'd always have to reckon with me. Mind you, I'm only telling you this because you insisted. You needn't tell me there's nothing in it, because I know there's nothing in it. We've had our differences, you and me, but I'd back you through thick and thin for playing straight." He half closed his eyes and gazed steadily at Andy, and thought:

"A wife can be a great convenience at a pinch." He had not even mentioned a peerage to Adela.

"Mrs. Raingo is unjust," said the Prime Minister, uneasily moving.

"Man to man, did you ever know a woman that wasn't? But you won't change her, where I'm concerned. Besides, all that's a detail. The point is she's determined not to let me risk a breakdown. Determined. And you know I can't defy her."

"Well, of course, perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps the risk is as great as you and she think. If so, I should be very sorry--" And, paused, stepped forward and held out his band, which Sam took. "I'll give you the peerage." His gesture was utterly noble.

"You mean you'll recommend me to the King," said Sam uncompromisingly.

"Naturally that's implied."

"Well, Andy, I shall do my best."

The front line of battle might have been in China instead of within hearing distance of the big explosions--so thin and unreal did it appear beyond the foreground of chicane in which Sam had fought and won. He was ecstatic with triumph. He pictured Adela's self-centred bliss and Delphine's simple, tremendous adoration, when he should tell them the news. He was a superman. But for Andy he assumed a demeanour of anxious responsibility--the true sign of the able man modest enough to distrust himself.

"There's one thing I want to tell ye, lad," said the Prime Minister, sitting down back to front on Miss Packer's desk-chair and spreading out his long legs. "Just listen to me?"

Sam put himself into the attitude of deferentially listening; but he was saying to himself: "And I've got the title without paying a cent for it."

The Prime Minister proceeded:

"It's about Secret Service money. There'll be trouble over Secret Service money. There always has been. You have control over it, all of it, and nobody else has. It's from the administration of Secret Service that you get all your power--all I mean that's worth a bawbee. Every minister who wants Secret Service money has to come to you himself to get it. He has to tell you what he wants it for. See? Bribery, spies, expeditions. There's more goes in bribery than in anything else. You say 'Yes' or 'No' to 'em, but usually you say 'Yes.' The Treasury will make a fuss over fourpence if it's for simple straightforward propaganda; but they say nothing at all if it's for Secret Service. They'll pay and they won't ask for vouchers either. Only, once you've 'O.K.'d' a thing you can't control the amount. I reckon over a couple of millions will disappear this year in S.S. The fact is, any neutral can walk in and get S.S. money for alleged information--that's what it comes to."

"I see," observed Sam judicially. The one word "Power!" "Power!" "Power!" sang intoxicatingly in his head. "Then where'll the difficulty be?"

"It's like this. Both the War Office and the Admiralty are fighting like hell to be free of Records control. But I won't let 'em. They've both been hoaxed again and again in the most absurd way, and I won't let 'em do as they like--not if I can help it. I'm running this war--or it amounts to that, my lad."

"Well, if I have your backing--"

"Ah! But perhaps you won't always have it, son. I may be forced to go against you. There'll be a lot of cross-fighting. And it may be up to you to show me how you can be too strong for me. The War Office and the Admiralty hate me. They'd love to down me--if they could. A bit complex. But you've got it." Andy gave him a searching, furtive glance.

"I have," said Sam.

"Good. I knew you'd get it. There's nobody'll understand anybody better than you and me."

"I agree," said Sam. And he meant it. "Now about propaganda."

"Pooh! Do as you like. I've nothing to say about that. It keeps a lot of people employed that might otherwise be in mischief." Andy laughed and lit a cigarette. Sam had to begin earnestly to readjust his perspective.

"And when do I start?"

"Oh! Any time. The sooner the better. To-morrow morning. Just go down to the Ministry and take charge. And don't worry me. I ought to warn you, by the way, that your notion about dealing with the Paris press isn't as new as you think it is. We've nobbled one 'great daily.' I did hear what it's costing the British taxpayer, but I've forgotten. No doubt they're doing it on us too."

"Do you mean--?" Sam exclaimed, his patriotic prejudices somewhat flustered.

"Why not? You didn't suppose the British patrol was effective to keep the devil out of your great country. My belief is the devil was born somewhere in the City, near the Bank of England. I'll lay a hundred to one there are enemy spies in your Ministry."

"Cheerful!" said Sam. He was delighted with the phrase "Your Ministry."

A morning-coated gentleman hurried into the room.

"How do, Poppleham?" Sam greeted him casually.

"How do you do, sir?" responded respectfully the Prime Minister's principal secretary. And to his master: "You aren't forgetting the appointment for three-fifteen, sir? And here are the corrected notes for the speech."

The Prime Minister took a paper.

"Say, Raingo," said he. "Walk down with me to the House, will you? You know, of course, it's the great Man Power afternoon. Good heavens! What a circus!"

"I should like to come very much," Sam replied, curiously flattered and proud. At the same time there surged into his head crowds of new ideas for vitalizing and controlling his Ministry. Power! Power! He was a god.

The saluting began the very moment they got outside the door of No. 10. The journalists were there, in their everlasting vigil. "Click" went a camera. "The Prime Minister leaving Downing Street on his way to make his great speech on the Man Power Bill in the House of Commons." Etc. No doubt!

"I am just like a schoolboy--rather, a schoolgirl," thought Sam, noticing his own naïve and excited pride at being seen in company with the Prime Minister on this historic occasion. But was he himself recognized? If only they knew that he had been given a Ministry--a Ministry all to himself--and a peerage; given a peerage; no hint of a contribution to Party Funds! If only they knew! And they would know!

Yes, like a schoolgirl he was. For he wanted to skip and jump. (And all the while journalists and others were mistaking him for a plumpish, middle-aged fellow.)

"You don't mind if I don't talk much," said Andy. "I've got this damn' speech in my head--not very clearly either." The strange, withdrawn, naïve expression had come over his face again. You would have thought he was a poet, too simple to live, and butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. The orator was appearing. The Irishman was appearing; and the Scotchman seemed to have vanished. The instructed, the profane, and the cynical would warn you to beware specially of Andy in his Irish-poetic moods. "You may bet," they would say, "that whatever he's saying in English he's thinking something quite opposite in Old Irish or Gaelic or whatever it is."

At any rate, despite preoccupations with the damn' speech, he attended carefully to the salutes, and with punctilious geniality acknowledged every one of them. He then observed individually every person who failed to recognize and salute him; these failures somewhat distressed him. There were scores and scores of salutes and tens of failures; but had there been only one failure that one would have been the crumpled roseleaf in Andy's bed.

"You'll have to be thinking of a title, Sam," said Andy suddenly.

"My own name's good enough for me," Sam answered. Lord Raingo. Lord Raingo. Lord Raingo of--of what, Eccles? Perhaps. Rather good fun to forestall Andy in the use of the name of the district with which he had been so closely associated.

The dreamy poet, the orator, gave no reply.

At New Bridge Street one of the policemen noticed him, signalled to the others, and the whole of the traffic stopped instantly, so that Andy might cross in comfort to Palace Yard.

"I hate them to do this," Andy murmured. "But they will do it. I'd much prefer to wait with the others."

"Yes, you would!" thought Sam. " The false humility of the great man! The great Clyth waiting like anybody else for the policeman's gesture! Touching proof of the existence of true democracy!"

They crossed the road in a hush of whispers and glances. Everybody except the crudest bumpkins knew that the Prime Minister was crossing the road. The orator and poet saw nobody, nothing; absorbed in his mighty dream. Only he had a bright transient smile for the saluting policeman in the middle of the street. The schoolgirl, the nonentity almost trotting by the great man's side (for tall Andrew walked very fast) was wildly jealous of the great man's celebrity. Not a scrap of respectful attention for the nonentity; merely a faint curiosity as to who in God's name he might be! But they would know him--and soon!

Within Palace Yard the demeanour of the public was different. It was as if they knew all about Andy in Palace Yard. Even the gate-policeman's nod was a bit perfunctory.

"About a seat for you," said Andy. "Place'll be pretty full. I'll tell Poppleham to look after you, eh? But not the Peers' Gallery--yet, eh?" He smiled.

Sam naughtily resented the civil attention. Had he not sat in the House for years? Could he not look after himself?

"No. Not the Peers' Gallery. The Press Gallery," said Sam. "Seems the right place for the new Minister of Records, doesn't it?"

"But can you get in there?"

"I imagine I can. Au revoir." Dryly.

Sam had seen, and beckoned to, Lovesake, the sketch-writer of The Daily Paper; a thin, grim, grey man of fifty, with twinkling eyes and clefts under the chin and at the sides of the mouth as deep as ruts. He wrote in an ink of sulphuric acid. Lovesake had been editor of a daily in the north which years earlier Sam had bought and sold over the editorial head. He had begged Lovesake to stay on, but the fellow had refused and called him a leper and worse names still. However, Lovesake was a man who understood the world and who could be just when his prejudices were not too strongly engaged, and Sam and he had remained on quite friendly terms.

"Look here, Lovesake," said Sam. "Get me into the Press Gallery, will you? I've got a reason; I'll tell it you before the afternoon's over, and you can use it how you like."

Some discussion. Lovesake swore he couldn't do it, and nobody could do it--on such an afternoon and at such short notice. But in the end he said:

"Oh, curse it! I'll wangle you in my place. I don't want to hear the old villain's disgusting patter. I'll fake up my sketch from your impressions." He laughed pleasantly enough, his eyes sparkled with fun. They ascended in a lift, and twice, before the ascent and after it, Lovesake had to perform feats of prevarication and persuasion, first with a policeman and then with a genial official in evening dress bearing impressive insignia on his bosom. The sketch-writer, obviously beloved of all, was marvellously and successfully persuasive; but neither the policeman nor the official had ever heard of the name of Raingo; which was rather humiliating for Sam.

However, he comforted himself with the thought: "If I told them what I was going to be--what I in fact am! . . . The schoolgirl again.

Sam glimpsed a shabby little refreshment-room where kindly, aproned girls were murmuring with reporters. The Press Gallery was incredibly small and incommodious; two rows of narrow seats with narrow desks in front of them. The reporters could neither have sat down, nor, having sat down, have risen up, if the desks and the seat-backs had not been hinged. A few men stood at either end, and others were continually passing in and out. A horrible lack of space; no air, no repose, no ease. A tapping, behind, of Morse instruments. The gallery seemed to be framed in elaborate wood carving whose sharp points Sam felt on his head and his shoulder as, after ages of waiting, he squeezed himself, and was squeezed, into a front-row seat next but one to the end. He realized that Lovesake had done a miracle for him. He had no right to be where he was, save the licence bestowed by tradition on millionaires. Lovesake had his sharp knife into the abstraction of millionaires, but even Lovesake was disarmed at the sight of a concrete specimen, of the hated class. Millionaires were haloed, and the nearer you came to the centre of power, the more brightly shone the halo. So it was.

The house lay below the future Lord Raingo. He was revisiting the glimpses of the moon, and felt very nervous and excited. Had he not got a ticket for Paradise in his pocket, he would have been humiliated to witness again, from this secret perch, the scene, so familiar and so strange, where he had failed and failed and whence he had fled in bitter, beaten mortification. But now he was uplifted, patronizing, scornful. His thought ran: "Thank God I've done with all that!"

Above, caged in the Ladies' Gallery, he descried a fashionable woman with a complexion well-tended but withering.

"Good heavens! What orientalism!" he scoffed, as if orientalism was peculiar to the miserable House.

The gallery opposite him was packed; the side-galleries were half full; the floor of the House was packed, a dozen or so members seatless and standing. He recognized many, very many, and many others he did not recognize; either they were new or he had completely forgotten them. The thing had the unreality of a play; with all the old, remembered gestures--the awkward bowings to the Chair, the slouching, the restlessness, the turning over of papers, the soundless whisperings, the deliberate histrionic attitudinizings.

There on the Front Bench lounged the gang, with Andy in the midst, and Tom Hogarth forcibly gesticulating to him. (Had Sam estranged Tom?) Every member of the luncheon party was present, except of course Lord Ockleford and the Colonial Premier, who were both conspicuous in the galleries; schemers, plotters, intriguers, formidable all . . .

Loud cheers startled Sam, who had been looking at the Ladies' Gallery, and idly wishing that Delphine was there. Andy was on his long legs; Andy was facing the music. Andy surveyed the assembly challengingly, defiantly, showing his upper teeth; and yet he had dignity, too, as befitted the greatest man in the world. The cheering ceased as though from fatigue and an uneasy sense of insincerity. Every eye in the House was on Andy, except those of his adjacent colleagues, who were too proud to be seen looking up at him in expectation. The House, deeply aware of a terrible occasion, was cowed, apprehensive, frightened, and very self-conscious. The British Empire had its back to the wall. Huge destinies were in the balance, one against another. The bewildered sheep on the floor of the House seemed to yearn towards Andy for comfort and inspiration.

Sam felt his heart beating, and he despised his heart for being perturbed. Andy had begun, and the grey-haired reporter next to Sam was pencilling hieroglyphics as conscientiously and stolidly as though he were setting down a speech at a Royal Academy banquet. For him, the reporter, Andy's oration was so many words in a certain order, and arbitrarily divided by time into sections of equal length. Sam perceived immediately that his boyhood's enemy had looked upon the audience and seen that they were simple sheep, and was treating them accordingly. Phrase after phrase Andy gave them, and they baa'd in unison. "We are fighting for all that is most sacred in our national existence." Loud cheers. "Our men retired, but were never routed, and once more the pluck of the British soldier, which refuses to acknowledge defeat, has saved Europe." Loud cheers. "It is idle to imagine, as some very lighthearted people seem to think, that we have got an unlimited reserve of man-power in this country"--and Andy looked round for anyone daring enough to question this profound and subtle truth. The sheep grew grave and watchful of themselves, as if saying with awe: "This man is a realist, and is bold enough to disclose to us unpleasant facts which it is supremely important for us to know. We too must be realists."

"Yes," whispered a voice behind Sam--it was Lovesake's. "And if he told 'em that two and two made four they'd cheer his remarkable insight like hell."

"Yes," Sam murmured back. "He's putting it over."

"Hsh!" complained the reporter, who was strenuously coping with Andy's delivery.

"Sorry!" Raingo handsomely and humbly apologized.

But Andy, it appeared, was not after all doing very well. His voice, silvern when he was inspired, became rasping when inspiration failed. It was rasping now. There was no conviction behind his verbiage, and no reasoning. He would throw men of fifty to the tyranny of sergeant-majors, he would desolate homes and destroy businesses, merely because he had willed to do so and without advancing any serious argument whatever in support of the policy. The sheep were a little restive. He lost himself in some figures; colleagues were prompting him; he was in a regular mess; but he listened only haughtily to his anxious colleagues, then calmly dropped the matter, thrust away the tangle, and proceeded to his next point. It was the wisest course in the circumstances, but much strength and cynicism was needed to adopt it.

Sam admired Andy in this hour; nay, he liked him. Andy was the greatest fighter of them all. He had no scruples, no sense of justice or of decency, no loyalties; his cynicism was dazzlingly intrepid; he would have sent his carriage to the funeral of a man he had secretly assassinated. But he could fight and keep on fighting; his energy and resource were without end. He could not be beaten even by himself. He was not to-day in vein, his chief weapon, original rhetoric, had fallen from him; he had a foolish cause to defend. But there he stood, the embodiment of the will-to-win! Not a drop of English blood in him, but there he stood, dominating and bullying hundreds of pure-bred proud Englishmen. He was a fine sight to Sam.

"Power!" thought Sam. "I have had power myself; but it was nothing compared to this power."

And he longed for this power, knowing that he could never have it, but absolutely resolved to get a kind of power nearly equal to it, to blaze somehow in the public eye by the light of his great deeds, and to encounter the most puissant ministers among his future colleagues on level terms. Andy had inspired him.

(He did not care a fig now whether or not he had estranged Tom Hogarth.)

And then there was a wild, protracted storm of cheering from one side of the House. In addition to employing men of fifty to win the war, Andy had proposed to make assurance doubly sure by applying conscription to Ireland. The cheerers, however, had suddenly forgotten the war. To conscript Ireland was an end in itself, an act of justice, an act of righteous revenge. Soon not a soul in the House cared twopence about the war or about all or anything that was most sacred in the national existence. The chamber rang with cheers and howls; and Andy had to wait. He waited disdainfully. He resumed, and was assailed and supported at every sentence. He said what he had to say and sat down in silence. Not a cheer. Not a baa from the sheep. And then, after a dose of oil from a veteran, Irish oratory was loosed, furious, brilliant, ferocious, murderously passionate. Andy scarcely listened; he smiled. The sheep ran out in droves for a division in which Andy got a majority of over two hundred. Another division; a still higher majority. A third division and the second reading of the Man-Power Bill was overwhelmingly carried. The absurdity was going steadily forward to fruition.

Andy had gone, sure of the result. He had not triumphed, but he had won. His speech had reached the ends of the earth. It was causing reflection at Kaiserlich Head-quarters. It was making men of fifty to tremble, and the wives of men of fifty to weep; and people were saying that, in view of the peril to the Empire, they would not go to the theatre that night. In short, life was rather serious.

Lovesake had departed from the Press Gallery. Sam went also. He met Lovesake in Palace Yard.

"This true about your joining the Ministry, Mr. Raingo?" asked Lovesake.

"It is," said Sam. "I was going to tell you."

He walked off. Andy must have given out the item.

The incurable schoolgirl, in girlish curiosity, was on his way to inspect, at a safe distance, the House of Lords entrance, which he would soon be using as familiarly as though he had never used any other entrance. But on this occasion he did not reach it, because he was accosted by a little vivacious man who with bent head and a cigar between his teeth, and hands behind his back, was contemplatively strolling. The little man happened to raise his head.

"Hello, Raingo!" Sam hesitated. "You don't know me from Adam." There was no resentment or disappointment in the little man's low voice.

"Yes, I do. You're Rebbing. I remember you quite well, but it's how many years since I saw you? You're in the House now, of course. Went out and got wounded. Now do I know you from Adam or don't I?"

They walked together. Years earlier Francis Rebbing, then extremely young, had been sent down by the Central Office to make a few electioneering speeches for Sam. They had not met since. They were both pleased at the encounter.

"You've been hearing the show?" Rebbing asked.

"Yes. I was in the Press Gallery."

"Oh! The Press Gallery. What did you think of it--I mean the show?"

"Much the same as you do," said Sam.

Rebbing gave one of his free, jolly laughs, which transformed, but only for a few moments, his earnest, pondering, resolute face.

"I've never forgotten one thing you said to me during that election," said he, gazing up at Sam's head.

"Ah?"

"Yes. You said that the only mischief with democratic politics was that you had to govern people at their level, not at your own."

"Bit obvious that, isn't it?"

"Possibly. But it didn't seem so to me at the time, and I've never forgotten it."

"Well, said Sam, patting Rebbing's shoulder familiarly. "That's flattering. That's really flattering, that is. I'm not like other folks. I'm highly susceptible to flattery, especially genuine flattery. You do me good."

"I must go back," said Rebbing. "Come along with me into the Lobby."

"All right."

Sam beheld again the strange, dark Gothic interior, better fitted to be the scene of a romance-mystery by Mrs. Radcliffe than the gossiping place of hundreds of high-minded statesmen, their suitors and their masters. Sam, standing apart with Rebbing, his back to the throng, glimpsed a little drive of members rushing in a body from somewhere to somewhere else. Suddenly he saw the place with a new imagination, as if, while deeply intimate with it, he had never seen it before. Members were always driving lit droves to and fro, through refreshment-rooms, terraces, libraries, smoking-rooms, and grim, conspiratorial passages. Or else they were asleep. Bells were always sharply ringing, commanding instant, blind obedience. Had he not heard members asking: "Look here. Which lobby do I vote in this time? Ayes or Noes?" That was the life of the common member in this theoretically royal palace. Sheep, scurrying forward at the onrush and yelp of the trained dog!

"Yes," Rebbing was saying. "He was very well received, at first, but a few idiots can make a devil of a lot of noise. Non-idiots never cheer or make any sort of a row. Did you ever hear such cheers as when he proposed Irish conscription? But Irish conscription will never go through in this world. He's bound to drop it. And even when he's dropped it, he won't get the Bill through this week, as he swore he would do. He may have a safe two hundred majority, but he daren't use it until he's given us an extra two days for debate, and he knows it!"

Sam thought that the quiet, eager, determined young man of forty was perhaps somewhat unduly teaching his grandmother Sam to suck eggs. But he admitted to himself that he had been forgetting the noisiness of fools and the silence of the other kind. There was, there must be, a considerable leaven of wholesome sagacity in this mob. Indeed, he had always known there was. Only his political failure had obscured the fact for him.

"So you're going into the Ministry," said Rebbing quietly. How characteristic of him not to have burst forth about the news immediately on meeting Sam!

"Is it abroad already?"

"Yes, it's all abroad."

"Well?" Sam waited.

"I'm glad, very glad," said Rebbing, more quietly than ever.

Sam was enheartened. He became a good man inspired by high resolves, because a good man appreciated him and believed in him. He would work to earn the approval of the silent ones. Yes, his life had lost its direction for a space, but now the direction was found again. He had had a great talent, used it, and succeeded. He had another talent; he would use it, and succeed once more. Beyond everything he wanted the morrow to dawn.

"Heard how Budstock is?" asked Rebbing.

"Budstock? Who's he?"

"Your predecessor," said Rebbing, with a faint, ironic smile. Sam blushed. In two days the man whom he was succeeding had never been mentioned by anybody; and Sam had totally forgotten him. Sam tried hard not to blush, but he blushed--so disturbing were the implications of this swift oblivion.

Sam entered the Berkeley Street service-flat, his London home between six and seven that evening and he had had no tea. When in Essex he always thought of the flat as agreeable. And by comparison it was, because you knew where you were in it, and could, sooner or later, get things done for you. But, absolutely, it was a poor, mean affair. Four rooms (plus a bath-room), three of them dark, and none of them very large. Fusty, musty, grimy, impersonal, undistinguished; no better, really, than a suite in an hotel--in fact not so good. There was life in an hotel; but here was no life. The flat, like Moze Hall, was quite unsuited to his income and to his desires, and he had tolerated it for several years.

Of course the war rendered simplicity of living a virtue. But that was not the reason which had established him in the flat, nor which kept him there. The reason was Adela's lack of interest in domesticity, her dreaming self-absorption, her mental habit of living discontinuously from moment to moment. It was her business to give him adequate homes; he would have been able to inspire her in the habit of home-making, but he could not carry out the enterprise himself. That was the woman's job; he could not take it from her, and moreover he certainly did not want to take it from her, and moreover he certainly did not want to appear in a feminine role and look ridiculous. No! The job was Adela's; she hadn't done it, never would do it, couldn't do it; and so it wouldn't be done.

He threw down a copy of The Evening Standard on the table in the dining-room, which absurdly was also the hall. The news was in The Evening Standard. He walked from room to desolate room, turning lights off and on. Adela was not in. God knew when she would be in; it might be eight o'clock. He rang a bell, for tea, and sat down in the dining-room. Not a flower in the whole place! He would say to her, gently, when she arrived: "Couldn't we have a few flowers here?"

Then he heard the lift and the lock. The door opened. Adela! Adela with parcels and a bunch of assorted flowers in white paper. She had a disconcerting faculty for taking the wind out of his sails, for putting him in the wrong. She seemed sometimes to divine his criticisms in advance and forestall them. Not only was she home early, but she had brought flowers!

"You here! All alone?" she murmured pleasantly.

"As if we were always having crowds of callers!" said Sam in his mind, but not unpleasantly.

She came up to him and kissed him, looking through him in her dream. In a moment she had littered the room: wonderful how with so little material she could do it.

"I thought you'd like a few flowers," she said, subtly inferring that for herself she would not have troubled to buy flowers--but of course was she not always thinking of him?

"It was a good notion," said he.

Evidently she had not heard the news. She would be capable of passing through forty streets and never noticing a newspaper placard.

The waitress entered the room. Adela glanced at her with latent hostility.

"Yes?" she questioned.

"I rang for some tea," Sam explained.

"Oh, haven't you had your tea, dear? I've had mine. Some tea for Mr. Raingo, please."

Now, thought that hypercritic; Samuel Raingo, the first idea of some women in these circumstances would have been to inquire whether their husbands had had tea, and even if they had had tea themselves they would have said: "I'll have another cup to keep you company." But not Adela, whose brain was never visited by such romantic ideas.

No sooner had the waitress left the room and was shutting the door behind her than Adela called:

"Waitress! Waitress!"

The woman returned, rather sullen; she was always being summoned back in this fashion.

"Just put these flowers in water, please. And distribute them about the rooms."

In silence the waitress took the flowers. Could you imagine a house-mistress leaving the care and placing of flowers to a servant? Was it not the special prerogative and art of wives see to the flowers? And Adela (by fits and starts) so interested in gardening too! Thus Sam privately.

"I say," said he, as she was proceeding to her bedroom.

"Yes, I can hear you," she answered, not stopping. "I'll leave the door open."

The difficult Sam made a movement of impatience, which he checked.

"I've been talking to Jenkin about Geoffrey," he called. "You haven't heard anything, of course."

She returned instantly to the dining-room, and this time with her grey eyes gazed at him instead of through him.

"No. I haven't. Who's Jenkin?"

"Who's Jenkin? He's in the War Cabinet. You know. He knows more about prisoners and so on than anybody in the Government."

He told her all that had passed, and she put a hundred queries.

"Oh, my dear! But this is good." She had been dragged out of her dream. "If they're cabling we might hear something to-night, mightn't we?"

"No. You couldn't hope for that. But perhaps in a day or two."

"But if they really are cabling?"

There she was, with the incurable bent of her mind, implying that Sid Jenkin had promised what he did not intend to perform: thinking the worst: she always would think the worst when it was a question of motive; always, always. She sat down; no doubt she had already forgotten entirely her mission to the bedroom. But somehow Sam was touched by the naiveté of her passionate maternal instinct. He saw her as she had been over twenty years earlier, with Jeff spread out on her knees. She had been an incompetent, withal dangerous mother; but indeed a mother, indeed a tigress with a cub.

And she looked exactly the same now as then--not aged by the world's contacts. She inspired respect and pity. Ordinarily she was as inhuman as a fay; but now she was human to the point of pathos. Sam wanted to see Jeff back safe and sound; he wanted it very much; he was tremendously fond of Jeff and proud of him; he probably had thought of Jeff oftener than Adela had done; but when Adela thought of Jeff her heart and mind were white-hot with emotion.

Sam knew that he must tell Adela the latest political news. He hesitated on the brink of doing so, perhaps from diffidence or shyness. It was not that he feared to disturb her mood; for he might have shot the news at her before any mention of Jeff, and surely ought to have done so. It was that the news was so enormous--he could not tell it naturally; he had a feeling akin to shame. Queer! He positively had to brace himself to tell her the news.

"Well," he said at length, clearing his throat. "I'm going to be Minister of Records, and they're giving me a peerage because I told 'em my heart wouldn't stand an election and all the rumpuses of the House of Commons."

He was so self-conscious that he could not look at her, and when he did so he reddened a little. Adela turned pale. She was much moved, and could scarcely believe her ears.

"Well!" she muttered, in a high, thin tone, reacting after her fashion to what was by far the greatest surprise of her life. And she walked out of the room.

"She's as put about as I am," thought Sam.

"Sam," she called presently from her bedroom. Her voice carried with extraordinarily penetrating clearness. It would have been a terrible, torturing voice had she been of a nagging disposition, but she was not.

"Yes?" He hated these conversations between rooms; they seemed to him so undignified; yet somehow she always had dignity; also at times he copied her habit of them.

"Shall I have a coronet? Do I wear one?"

"Ask me another!" he replied grimly.

What a question! Good God! What a question! But she never had any sense of the order of importance of things. It was not that she was specially interested in gewgaws; quite the reverse, though she might be a snob in certain directions. It was simply that she had happened to think first of a peeress's headgear. He did not like it, forgetting in his self-righteousness that his own mind more than once had dwelt uneasily on the subject of a peer's robe. The chief fact, he said to himself; was that he was to be a Minister, not that he was to be a peer. But he did not say to himself that he too had been thinking more of the peerage than of the exalted office.

The waitress brought the tea and went out with four empty vases.

"And Geoffrey will be the Honourable," said Adela, coming back to the dining-room. "Let me have just a sip of your tea, dear," she said, standing close by his side.

He was amazed at this gesture. Well, the scene was strange, he thought, very strange.

"You're fearfully clever, Sam."

"I'm not at all clever," Sam protested. "I told the P.M. what I knew you'd think about things, and he immediately offered me a peerage."

"Oh! So you brought me into it!"

"I did!"

"But you never told me anything about it."

"My dear girl, you know perfectly well I told you yesterday at lunch the P.M. had sounded me about the Ministry."

"But you didn't say anything definite."

"Here, have some more tea. I didn't say anything definite yesterday because there was nothing definite until to-day--until about four hours ago in fact. I had to go to the House. The P.M. asked me to. And then from the House I came straight here, and I've told you." All which, while fairly accurate, was ingeniously disingenuous. But Sam was always apt to be a bit secretive.

"I see. What title shall you choose?"

He had been sure that she would ask that. About, his department, his Ministry, the nature of his duties--not a word!

Just like her! She would put last things first. But his attitude towards her, if censorious, was not unbenevolent. It was made kindly by his joyful pride in the brilliant situation. He felt kindly towards all the world. And she had sipped his tea.

"What do you think of the sacred name of Raingo for a title?" he suggested, with intimate playfulness, looking up at her.

"That ought to do," she agreed.

"Well, if you think so, it's hereby settled then," said he, reflecting that he was using her with all due consideration.

"I do wish I'd been presented when I was a girl. Seems so odd me being presented for the first time at my age. My great-aunt was anxious to present me, but mother thought it wasn't worth the expense. If I'd known--"

"Ah!" said Sam. "But you didn't know."

He was like a benignant god. And in calm contemplation he beheld her past, not comparing it enviously with his own, or snubbing it with the sneer of the self-made.

The waitress entered with the vases full of flowers.

"We shall dine at seven-thirty," said Sam to her. "Will you bring the menu?"

He did not consult Adela. He was being benevolently masterful, because she had womanishly sipped his tea. He gave her the evening paper with the news in it under a two column head-line on the first page.

"Yes," she remarked. "He knows the war will soon be over, and so he offers you a post."

Now this was surely an astounding, unjust and indefensible remark. How had she come suddenly to decide that the war would soon be over, seeing that never had the Allies been in a worse pass, and that the war could not possibly end until the Allies had won? Yet Sam himself had had the notion that the war would, in some mysterious way, soon be ending in an Allied victory. But of course he privately condemned the notion in her. She had not the right to form such a notion. As for her aspersion upon Andy's motives, he could only shrug his shoulders at that perversity. The fact was that her mind had positively not developed since she was eighteen.

"I wish the war would soon be over!" he exclaimed. This was not true.

The domestic evening developed in a manner quite unforeseen by Samuel. In the middle of the tête-à-tête dinner, during one of the absences of the waitress, Adela jumped up, protesting against the girl's disposition of the flower-vases.

"Now do sit down," said Sam mildly. "This dinner isn't a passover."

He detested restlessness at a meal, especially on the part of the mistress of the house; and Adela could never be still. She had no sense of the proper formalism of a meal. Admitted, she moved with dignity, but the act of moving was undignified.

"Now do sit down," he repeated, imploring rather than commanding.

She ignored him; probably she had not heard him.

"The woman might have known--" she said coldly, and swept away a vase into the drawing-room, bringing another vase therefrom for the table. Before she could set it down, the waitress had returned, and saw her. Not content with this performance, Adela picked the vase up again, took it into her bedroom and put a third vase on the table. The waitress glared.

"Damn it all!" Sam was about to explode, but he restrained himself and smiled instead.

A trifle perhaps, unworthy of the notice of a statesman! But to Sam it was an awful symbol, typifying the future, as well as the past. She had after all no imaginative vision of a great event. Were not Lord and Lady Raingo, a Minister and his consort, dining together for the first time? She had never been a good hostess. Would she be equal to the position of Lady Raingo? Despite her strange, undeniable native authority she would not. She would infallibly make a mess of the position. She could not study the art of entertaining. If she entertained she would entertain untidily, raggedly. People would blame her and pity him, and ministerial dinners would be a humiliation. She would always be the same Adela. The title would be a mere ticket tied to her. Why had they no intimates, and hardly any friends? Why was his wealth futile and ridiculous? Because she would not nourish friendship. On such a night friends ought to have been dropping in or telephoning every few minutes. Nobody had dropped in, and only two men had telephoned--club friends who had no knowledge whatever of Sam's home life.

In that moment Sam relinquished part of his new ambition. Adela was hopeless, hopeless. He bore her no ill-will. His mood was magnanimous, for he had accomplished a great deed with Andy; and he was launched on an heroical voyage. So he forgave her. He even forgave her for having made not the slightest reference to his duties, to the nature of his role in the Government. All the evening he had waited for her to show some sign of curiosity on the immense subject. True, he had never in his life talked business with her or encouraged in any way curiosity concerning business. But this was not business.

It was above business. However, he forgave her. She was born thus and thus, and she was, of course, entitled to her idiosyncrasy--could not rid herself of it. After dinner he said that he had to go out, and he went out. It was a night on which he might well have to go out. She was quite bland and full of equanimity. A world to herself!

He walked down St. James's Street to the Club. Searchlights were as usual probing the dark firmament over the darkened streets, but there appeared to be no sign of an air-raid. Policemen stood nonchalant. The city was timorously hoping for a quiet night. How unspectacular Sam felt, he, the King's Minister and peer-to-be, as he slipped, like a common clubman out of St. James's Street into Pall Mall. Surely there ought to have been something to distinguish him from the common clubman! But there was nothing.

He had to justify to himself his visit to the Club; a Minister could not stroll casually into a club for lack of occupation. Ministers had a reason for all their goings and comings. Well, he could justify himself. Among the members of the Club were two cronies whom he knew by report to be on the staff of his Ministry, and who were said to dine at the Club almost nightly. He would meet them at the Club, he would join them in the smoking-room after dinner and chat with them quite informally, as member to member, without the least trace of ministership in his demeanour, but rather as one modestly anxious to pick up wrinkles--such wrinkles as officials of a Ministry might properly give to a new chief in the sacred confidential privacy of a club, each individual being absolutely sure that no wrong use would afterwards be made of anything said. The cronies would be flattered, and Sam would be edified, and word would get round that the new Minister promised to be pleasingly different from other ministers.

Nobody in the gloomy tessellated hall of the Club; nobody in the balconies above! Sam looked through the great sheet of plate glass into the long coffee-room, which had islands of lamplight here and there. Several waitresses standing in everlasting patience; one cashier at the pay-desk! Not a table occupied! After nine o'clock in the evening the Club seemed to be deserted. Yes, one table at the extreme eastern end of the room was occupied; he could see it by craning his neck. The cronies occupied the table; Drakefield, the youngish lame man in uniform, and Crawshaw, a middle-aged thin man. They were leaning across the small table towards each other, as though fearful lest their close secrets might be overheard by waitresses a dozen yards off.

Sam decided that he would wait in the hall until they should emerge from the coffee-room, and then either follow or precede them up the stairs into the smoking-room. He could not disturb them at dinner; he could not even accost them on the way out; they must first see him and nod and perhaps congratulate him. True, he meant to be pleasingly different from other ministers, but there was such a thing as ministerial dignity. He waited and he waited, obscure in a corner of the hall. He saw island after island of light vanish from the coffee-room. The coffee-room door swung open, and he jumped up ready, but only a waitress appeared. He peeped again through the plate glass the cronies were still eating. He suspected that the hall-porter had an eye on his curious proceedings, and he walked straight upstairs. The great smoking-room was in darkness; club economy in the matter of electric current!

"I've had about enough of this," he said to himself, impatiently. The empty Club was getting on his nerves. He could not await for ever the tardiness of the damned cronies. He had done what was decently possible, and he was entitled to leave. In leaving his conscience was clear, except that he had the sinister sensations of a foiled conspirator. On the pavement outside he pretended to himself to wonder what he should do next; but he knew what he would do next.

He had telephoned twice to Delphine during the late afternoon, once to tell her the news and to say that he was not yet sure whether he could see her in the evening, and once to say definitely that he could not see her in the evening. It was a sense of the fitness of things that had decided him not to see her that night. He had thought that on such a night he owed something, if only a formality, to his wife; and also, unless abroad on business advantageous to his official position, it was meet for him to be at home in case of a message or summons from the Prime Minister. He ought certainly now, in pursuance of this righteous policy, to return to Berkeley Street. And yet he was well aware that he would not return to Berkeley Street. From the moment of setting out for the Club he had been surreptitiously hoping that the visit there would prove futile. Had he stayed long enough at the Club he could not have failed to encounter the cronies. He had found obscure and incoherent reasons for not staying long enough. Proof that Delphine had hold of him, and that the obsession of her was strong enough to cause him to be dishonest with himself and untrue to his conscience.

Here he was, a grown man, a middle-aged man, a man of importance and renown, a Minister with grave responsibilities, slinking off in the dark to join a young mistress who was simply nobody at all, in a dubious interior which his wealth and his passion had created for her. Incredible! And he was unfaithful to his wife, and he saw the doors of the Divorce Court ajar for him, and ignominy awaiting him in his sixth decade. Not that he felt himself to be in his sixth decade. He felt young, absurdly so, and he approached Orange Street with most of the sensations of youth. An hour in the society of the unique, soothing, tender creature, was worth a million risks. Besides, he was safe. He cast off all fears and responsibilities, and as he unlocked the entrance to his second London home and with habitual movements lighted and climbed the stairs, he gave himself completely to the thought of Delphine.

"Delphine." Softly. "Delphine." More loudly.

He went into the sitting-room, the bedroom, the bath-room, the tiny kitchen. Delphine was out. He could not surprise her by his arrival, nor hear her exquisite tones of joy at the surprise. His gloom was instant and intense. He roved from room to room, fiddling with switches, and desolation filled his heart. He sat down, picked a cigarette out of a coloured glass box and began to smoke. He was old and silly. Why had he entangled himself in such an absurd and mediocre liaison? He was in physical as well as mental pain. Now, Sam, no ridiculous, senile jealousy! You are a youth. You have confidence in your own masculine qualities. You must remember what a foolish figure you cut two evenings ago with your jealousy and your evil thoughts. She may have gone out on business connected with her sister Gwen. (Fancy having a bus-conductor for an unofficial sister-in-law!) Moreover, why shouldn't she go out? Is she to stay at home continuously lest your sublime highness may call even after he has said that he will not call? Is she to have no activity apart from you?

Preposterous. You are pre-eminently a fair-minded man, Sam, and you readily admit that these questions can only be answered in one way. Of course.

But his desolation was not in the least relieved. He remembered that, at the second telephoning, he had had a suspicion of a suspicion of hearing a male voice in the background of Delphine's calling perhaps a word that might just conceivably have sounded like "Savoy." Silly suspicion of a suspicion! He had smiled at it to himself. It had not really troubled him, because it was too perfectly fatuous. And even now, as he sat smoking in the easy chair in her silken bedroom, it was perfectly fatuous. He knew Delphine; his trust in her was illimitable. And yet! And yet! How grotesque is jealousy; it has no roots whatever in common sense! Sam rose and walked again, peering round, with half a disgusting intention to spy and pry and ferret.

A drawer in the writing-desk in the sitting-room was not quite closed. He opened it; full of papers. He pulled out a paper at random. It happened to be her birth-certificate. She was born in 1889, at Hackney. 1889? She was therefore twenty-nine. Whereas she had told him that she was thirty-two. Ah! She had wanted not to seem too young for him. A woman over thirty is a suitable mate for any age. Unique example of a woman exaggerating her years! Touching! But was it touching? Was it not an indication of a deceitful habit of mind? He did not know what to think.

So he imitated his wife and thought the worst, and left the flat hurriedly.

In the dim street he glanced up and down, shamed, guilty, as though fearing private-inquiry agents, or even police-detectives. An entirely silly apprehension, and it showed his state of mind. He was not anxious about what he had done, but about what he was immediately going to do.

He walked off, bound for the Savoy. He, the dignified statesman, had yielded to the insane desire to search the Savoy for an erring mistress. He had had to yield. He realized the madness of the scheme. Supposing--a monstrous supposition--she was there, what could he do? Make a scene in the crowded Savoy, drag her away, he, the chief figure in that night's newspapers? Or just watch her from a distance and then retire? On the other hand, supposing she was not there, her absence would prove naught, would not allay his jealousy. Nothing could allay his jealousy. Never before in his life had he been jealous. Adela had frequently, in her incalculable way, gone off to spend evenings in town out of his sight, and he had not had a qualm, not a shadow of misgiving. But now he had discovered in himself the devil of jealousy; it had appeared, after lying hidden for a lifetime, and it was raging furiously within him, and he could not control it; he had absolutely no command over it.

"What a fool I am. What a dangerous fool! What a criminal fool!" he exclaimed. "Why don't I walk straight back to Berkeley Street? I have a heavy day's work before me to-morrow."

But he was crossing Trafalgar Square; he was in the Strand; he was passing what had once been, and would be again, the Hotel Cecil. He was in the Savoy approach. Still time to return to sanity and Berkeley Street. No, the sheeted doors of the Savoy revolved for him, and he was in the brightly-lit foyer, with vivacious figures moving to and fro, and vistas of glowing restaurants and sounds of music; a glittering, gay world curtained away within the dark, discouraged London world.

"I am mad! I am mad!"

He went direct and rapidly down the steps and into the restaurant cloak-room. Ordinarily he used the café cloakroom. The head of the cloak-room stared hard at him, as he stared hard at every man of apparent importance, took his hat and coat, and would not give him a ticket in exchange.

"That'll be all right, sir."

His lineaments were stamped for the night on the highly specialized brain of the head-attendant, and the compliment of getting no ticket would mean afterwards a shilling instead of a sixpenny tip.

As he left the cloak-room a man, entering, nodded to him.

"Hello, Raingo."

The man, whom he could not identify at the moment, looked at him curiously, half ironically, as if saying "So you're the new Minister, are you?" but made no remark.

"If he guessed what I'm here for!" thought Sam, and went boldly down into the restaurant, which was crowded, chiefly with uniforms, girls, and foreigners of all sorts. The strolling, mysterious Italian manager of the restaurant recognized him.

"Do you want a table, my lord? Can I get you a table?"

Astounding fellows, these supermen of the great hotels! No wonder they received the salaries of ministers!

"No thanks."

The manager bowed and passed on his rounds.

"My lord." It was the first time he had been so greeted, and the greeting was premature, but what a sensation it gave, even in his misery! He heard the echo of his wife's voice.

"Shall I have a coronet?" He satisfied himself that Delphine was not in the restaurant. She might be dancing. Did they dance at the Savoy nowadays? If so, where? He would not inquire. He had known that she would not be in the restaurant. And he knew that she would not be dancing. She would be, if anywhere, in the comparative discretion of the grill-room, to which he had first taken her, and which she preferred to any other of the public rooms. He had only gone to the restaurant in order to postpone the crucial moment. He went back to the foyer and turned to the right, and looked into the grill-room.

And almost the first person his feverish eye settled upon was Delphine--there in the middle of the big, half-full room, with a young officer. He could not for a few seconds believe his feverish eye. Terrible events happened in his brain. His jealousy was now incredibly justified. A minute earlier and it had been insane, and his visit to the Savoy insane. But now he was proved wise and to have acted wisely. Now he knew. The bowels of the earth had vibrated; the lovely temple in his brain was overthrown. The war was a dream, the Ministry a delusion, titles a game of fancy-dress.

The pair were drinking champagne. Someone must have told the Italian manager of the restaurant that the new Minister was to go to the House of Lords, for that part of the news had not yet reached the papers. Those fellows went about picking up items concerning the prominent; they forgot nothing; and they never made a mistake. . . . "Secret Service money." He could plainly hear Andy's peculiar dry Scotch tone telling him that Secret Service money would be the source of his power. Comic! His head was full of unrelated scraps. The officer seemed poor, shabby, unaccustomed to money and to the environment. Perhaps it was she who was paying--with the largesse of her elderly admirer. Such transactions were not unknown; indeed soldiers had fallen into the habit of regarding them as quite ordinary and even proper.

He glanced away. He was terrified lest she should see him; it was as if he, not she, was the evil-doer; and yet he wanted her to see him. He glanced again at the table; he could bear neither to look nor not to look. The two companions were both in profile to him. And now he saw on her face, directed to the young man, exactly the same expression of ecstasy, adoration, devotion, sweet acquiescence as he had often seen on it when her eyes were close, close to his own. Was it an unconscious trick? Was it acting? Or was she merely promiscuous, with transient but genuine passions? He was a unique specimen of a simpleton, and all that he had ever heard to the disadvantage of women was true. He turned and moved off and sat down by himself in the foyer.

No place for a Minister, the foyer of the Savoy at night! What could be his excuse for sitting there alone? Was he waiting for someone? Ministers do not wait; they are waited for. Ministers do not go to meet people; people come to meet them. Was it imaginable that any other member of the Government would sit solitary at night in so exposed a place as the Savoy foyer? Andy for instance? Or even Sid Jenkin? He smiled grimly at the wild thought of the Earl of Ockleford exhibiting himself in the Savoy foyer!

Sound of distant music. American voices. The recurrent swish of the doors. The fingers of the clock moved. Tomorrow morning, so near, he would be entering the Burleigh Hotel, so near, the seat of his Ministry, to take charge, to exercise dominion--and to receive other Ministers in search of Secret Service money. "Certainly, my dear Hogarth, I needn't say I fully approve. I wish all schemes were as sound as yours--seems to be." Urbane, with a scarce perceptible sting in the tail. And if they didn't like the sting they would have to lump it. But all was chimerical, phantasmal The fellow had, then, been to her flat, and had called out the suggestion "Savoy," probably from the other room, the bedroom! He could feel the impress and weight of her body as she reclined on his lap while telephoning to Berkeley Street.

But of course he was now being tragically absurd. He was not, and could not be, such a simpleton as all that. And all women were not alike. The beautiful, soothing, unselfish, modest girl was as straight as a die. Impossible that she should be otherwise. In his unconscious masculine egotism he was asking too much. Was she to have had no life before she came to him? She must have had friendships, poor as she was. A girl so good, so attractive, must have had acquaintances who were admirers. And she would be kind to them. Might not a man call on her? Was it a crime to sup tête-à-tête at the Savoy with a worn youth emerged for a few days from the hell of the trenches? He was utterly wrong; he was coarse; he had a foul mind. But was she a virgin when she came to him? Well, and supposing she wasn't? What then? What of it? Life was life. London was not Eccles. Was he going to add to his idiocies the idiocy of being retrospectively jealous? He had a broad mind. Yes, he had a Christian mind. Was he not continually, in secret, reproaching his wife for her tendency to think the worst? He must take hold of himself, drag himself out of this slough of vile morbidity into which he had weakly and odiously slipped. And all the time she was there, on the other side of the wall, drinking champagne with the fellow, caressing him with her black, voluptuous eyes and her blasted soft smile.

"I suppose you're here on secret service," said a quizzing, harsh voice.

Sam started at the phrase taken from his late thoughts. The speaker was the man who had so curtly accosted him in the cloak-room. Sam lifted his head, quite composed.

"I am, Sellings," he replied, with a calm, restrained smile.

The identity of Lord Sellings, once a guinea-pig director of one of his earlier companies, had suddenly occurred to him. An old, slim, grey-moustached, well-preserved man with a questing face. Sam despised him; but Sam's rule was always to be genial in the absence of any good reason for being the contrary. Moreover he was not ill-pleased to have somebody to talk to, though at the same time he would not have been ill-pleased to feast horribly in solitude on his evil thoughts. He could not explain himself to himself.

"So am I," said Lord Sellings, and sat down. Evidently Lord Sellings also wanted somebody to talk to.

"I've just been dining at the Babylon," he began. "Eight courses and nothing to eat. One course was asparagus. I had exactly four thin stalks. What's the good of these damn' things"--he pulled his meat-card out of his pocket--"if they don't mean something to eat?"

"Quite!" said Sam politely.

"Of course we gradually get used to things, and we don't realize how serious things are getting. I'm living in Hertfordshire, and I come up several days a week--I'm helping in the censorship--letters, and a nice place that is! I was doing a certain job in about an hour a day. They've taken it off me and given it to a chap who spends his whole time over it, and has three assistants and ten clerks--no, nine. Fool!"

"I'm not surprised," said Sam, with sympathy.

"I took a first-class season, and as often as not I have to travel third, with about ten others in a compartment. And d'you know you can't get a morning paper now down there? I should live entirely in town, but I can't afford it. My town house is shut. And you can't entertain unless you ask your guests to bring their own food. I ask you--what about it? Mismanagement somewhere. You mustn't tell me. I'm a member of four clubs. Can't lunch in 'em, too busy. And at night not a soul there."

"I've noticed that myself," said Sam.

"Oh, you have. But have you happened to go into the card-rooms? Plenty of chaps in the card-rooms. Oh, yes, the card-rooms are all right. But elsewhere--not a soul. Personally I don't gamble."

Then it was air-raids. The Viscount knew of two ladies at Putney who had lost their reason through the continued anti-aircraft barrage in the last raid. They were now in an asylum. He had put a bit of money, though he had none, into a theatrical venture, and the cursed raid emptied every theatre in London--and would keep 'em empty because people had always believed that raids could only happen in certain phases of the moon, and the last raid had destroyed that notion. . . . Sam was about to say that he had seen the House-Full boards out at two theatres that very evening, but he refrained.

The Viscount told of a friend of his who had actually seen men burning alive in kerosene tubs in the Nevsky Prospekt. Also that unless men were sent back to the land in all countries this year there would be a world famine in 1920. The experts, whom the Viscount knew, had proved it beyond the possibility of contradiction. In fact . . .

Sam heard a low voice. Delphine and her man were passing. Delphine passed within six feet of him. He was petrified. They disappeared down the stairs, no doubt to dance, if dancing there was.

"Yes. I agree," said Sam benevolently. "Things have come so gradually we don't realize how serious they're getting."

He would not trouble himself to argue with the old fool, who soon afterwards departed. He had discounted everything that the fool had said; but still there was a lot in what he had said. Who dared assert that in a few months men would not be burning alive in kerosene tubs in the Strand, and the Savoy transformed into a doss-house? Such was his mood.

He left the hotel, having been duly recognized by the head of the cloak-room. He was forth again in the dark, silent, deserted streets. . . . She was purity itself, constancy itself. Her gaze could not have lied to him. Either what he demanded of a woman was that she should be an Oriental slave, or she was perfectly entitled to go out to supper with anyone she chose. Nevertheless these statements and this logic did nothing at all to mitigate his frightful, resentful misery. He thought of their first meeting, his glance, something in her glance, the flash of desire upleaping in his heart, the tea in the tea-shop. He cursed the King's Minister who, in the early evening of life, had with a few unconsidered gestures forged the shackles which had so ignominiously bound him to a girl, a nobody.

The next morning, walking down from Berkeley Street to Norfolk Street, Strand, Sam wore a silk hat. With that and a black overcoat and clean white gloves and a tightly rolled umbrella and his middle-aged portliness, and the military carriage which he always adopted, partly by instinct and partly by intention, when approaching an ordeal, he certainly looked the Minister. His air was authoritative, even grim. But within he was just Sam Raingo, who still tasted the mediocre bacon which he had had for breakfast, and still felt the laces with which he had rather too tightly laced up his cloth-sided boots. For years he had not had a personal servant. The late-resumed habit of fending for himself, lost since his early twenties, and the resulting close knowledge of the resources and arrangement of his wardrobe, somehow rendered unreal the millions which by a special gift for that kind of operation he had conjured out of the bank-balances of other people into his own.

He had to find, amid the ornate terra-cotta of Norfolk Street, the Burleigh Hotel, seat of his new dominion. There it was; he descried the final "tel" of a tarnished gold sign. It stood on an island site, and looked neglected; the windows had blinds but no curtains, and gave glimpses of cheap office-furniture instead of the backs of toilet-mirrors at which provincial ladies would with naïve self-complacency prepare themselves for exhibition in metropolitan resorts. One of many scores of decent third-class hotels in London; forlorn; depressing.

Three motor-cars waited at the main entrance, two of them in charge of uniformed girls; at sight of an important arrival the expression on the faces of both girls subtly changed, and their faces and their whole bodies seemed to be saying: "Such as I am, I'm here, and I think I'm worth looking at; and I'm the war." Sam would not see them.

His soul hesitated but not his feet, not for an instant, as he mounted the steps. He knew absolutely nothing of his Ministry, save that two members of the Club were on its staff. Andy had told him nothing, given him no guidance, told nobody else to tell him anything. The Ministry had been handed to him to make what he could of it, how he pleased. Were his ignorance and his freedom the outcome of mere nonchalance in the highest places, or of the alleged national bias against co-ordination? Of course he might have put himself about to get knowledge; but he was too proud to do so.

"This is their policy," he thought. "Very well. I will begin at ten-fifteen a.m. (The Ministry shall have a quarter of an hour's grace, as it'll be my first visit.) Till then I will lie completely low."

He had not even telephoned to his Ministry to say that he might be expected. But that was Sam

The clock in the entrance-hall showed twelve minutes past ten; it was, however, three minutes slow. A shabby old hall-porter was being harshly unhelpful to a handsome lady who tried in vain to woo his favour by her youth, her sex and her lovely attire. The hall-porter in his time had probably resisted thousands of such besiegers.

Sam, behind an impressive and formidable countenance, was saying to himself: "Now it's up to you, Sam." Delphine and the unknown young officer were in his consciousness; they were profoundly there; buried, crushed, suffocated beneath a great, gritty mass of resolution. They could not stir. They might poison the roots of his being, but they could not influence his conduct nor impair the fullness of his efficiency. The old habit of energetic command, weakened by years of inertia, came back to him in strength, and he exercised it first upon himself. An enormous undertaking awaited him, looming; he could deal with it and he would deal with it, more than adequately. All his talents grew alert within him. Love, jealousy, disappointment were powerless.

He was about to affront the hall-porter, and through him symbolically to stamp himself by one sentence on the entire establishment, when the old man caught sight of him, and after a delay of a tenth of a second was transformed into quite a different hall-porter, a deferential, eager, smooth-voiced creature anxious to forestall orders by obedience.

"Good morning, my lord."

"This is all right," thought Sam, and said affably: "Good morning."

"Girl!" cried the porter in a tone like a slap in the face, to a very young girl bending over a large packet of stationery on the hall-floor. "Girl!"

The child look up, started, and flushed.

"Take his lordship upstairs."

All the grimness had left Sam's features. He nodded, still more affably than he had spoken, to the hall-porter. He felt, and was, the embodiment of good-nature, knowing that he had made a favourable impression. He, the Minister, was quite simply pleased to have pleased the hall-porter, and with his natural modesty he forgot for the moment what a tremendous swell he was in that forlorn, carpetless building. It did not occur to him that within a minute at most the tidings would fly along the farthest corridor and penetrate through all the shut, labelled doors: "The new Minister has come."

He followed the girl to the first-floor. Should he speak to her? Better not. Too much benevolence might be mistaken for weakness. As she passed a door with "Mr. Mayden" painted upon it, she knocked on it thrice, quickly, but without pausing on her way. Ten steps farther and she showed him nervously into a large, carpeted, well-furnished office-room, and left him there. He took off his hat and coat and hung them up, and poked the fire.

"I'm here," he thought, satisfied with the room. "I wish they wouldn't call me 'my lord'--yet; however, it's a fault on the right side. I wonder what'll happen next. Perhaps I ought to ring a bell."

He sat down at a great empty desk, and he was about to press a button when the next thing happened; the corridor-door opened, and there entered, limping, with a sidelong and rather apologetic glance, a slim man of youthful appearance in khaki.

"Do you remember me, Mr. Raingo?" he began with a smile delicious enough to undo most men, and any woman young or old.

Sam jumped up, went round the desk, and shook hands heartily.

"So you're the Mayden on the door opposite! I noticed the name, but it never occurred to me. . . . You belong here, do you? I'm delighted. Do you know, you don't look a day older--honest."

Mayden, when the war started, had been a rising star of the hotel-world; not an hotel-manager, but managing-director of an hotel-owning company. Sam had become very friendly with him during a protracted stay, for business purposes, at one of the Company's hotels in Manchester; and he had soon discovered that in the hotel-world Mayden knew all about everything, from buying wines and cigars and checking the distribution of linen to handling head-waiters and drafting annual reports for shareholders; and indeed that the man's timid and deprecatory demeanour was nothing but Nature's mask for probably the only English-born person in England who could teach Italians how to run an hotel.

Sam's practice was to begin interviews with inferiors by interesting himself in their affairs, and he soon learnt that Mayden had joined the Army Service Corps and within a year come home with a permanently damaged leg, result of an unforeseeable long-range bombardment on Lines of Communication. The cripple had the stars of a captain.

"And what are you here?"

"Secretary-General, sir."

"Why 'general'?"

"I don't know. I understood it was Sir Henry's idea--"

"Sir Henry Budstock?"

"Yes. And I don't like it. I should prefer to drop it."

"Drop the 'general'! Not at all. Wouldn't drop it for anything. Mushroom ministries must have mushroom methods. The War Office may be content with a mere secretary, but we'll stick to our secretary-general. Will you give me one of those cigarettes of yours--if they're still the same! Sit down."

"Tell me," said Mayden, lowering himself cautiously on one leg into a chair, "if you don't mind, how did my arrangements for your arrival work out?"

Sam burst out laughing, as cheerfully as if his existence had no dark sinister background.

"So it was you, was it? They worked out perfectly. The porter fellow recognized me at once and conducted the grand entry in style. I didn't know I was so well known by sight."

"Perhaps you aren't," Mayden ingratiatingly and contritely smiled. "But I didn't know when you'd arrive and I wanted to be sure of things. So I circulated a photograph--it's a dodge I instituted in our hotels for when we were expecting the great. People love to be recognized instantly."

"They certainly do. And you told the girl to knock three times on your door as she passed?" Mayden smiled again. "I say, did you get any official notice of my appointment?"

"No, sir."

"Then how did you know?"

"I only read it in the evening paper."

"The devil you did! Well, it's a great world, isn't it? Now what is the secretary-general supposed to do in this hotel? I know nothing. Nothing. Nothing."

"I'm supposed to look after the personnel, the building, and the stores. That's all right, of course. What I don't care for is presiding at banquets to Colonials and other foreigners--I only do it because Sir Ernest won't."

"And who's Sir Ernest, if I'm not being indiscreet?"

"Sir Ernest Timmerson. He's your second-in-command, sir."

"Oh, Timmerson. Yes, of course. Able fellow," said Sam cordially, though he had contempt for Timmerson's abilities.

"Very," Mayden calmly agreed.

"Now, let me hear something about the personnel, will you?"

"Two hundred and fifty-nine on the roll at present, including forty odd women, mostly young, some barristers, two bankers, three generals, I couldn't say how many journalists, two historians, seven professors, two heads of trusts--call them captains of industry if you prefer it, a baronet, six or eight novelists and two playwrights, a musical critic, an art-expert, two actors, a bill-broker, two curators of museums; the rest are only gentlemen. Oh I was forgetting. There are several poets. One of them's in charge of 'Cables,' and he's the most orderly and punctual person in the building--perhaps in any building."

"But this is the most wonderful Ministry that ever was," exclaimed Sam, hiding amazement beneath jocularity.

"It's the only Ministry I know anything about. But I dare say it is the most wonderful. Whoever invented the phrase 'Ministry of all the talents,' must have foreseen it. Everything comes true in the end. And naturally for 'Records'--"

"But what's the scheme, what the idea--the organization of the Ministry?"

"It is based on what we call the 'nationals.' I couldn't tell you off-hand how many nationals we have, but there's one for every country and colony--or most colonies. Each national has charge of propaganda in his own country."

"Foreigners, are they?"

"Not at all. They're all British. But they're called 'Nationals '--I don't know why."

"You haven't told me who sees to the finance of the show."

"Ah! His name's Locker. You know, Locker & Locker--chartered accountants, Amen Corner. But he doesn't live here; he lives in another hotel up the street."

"Well, you might let him know I should be greatly obliged if he could come and see me this afternoon at four--if it's quite convenient."

"Yes, sir. Now there's a most important question, if you'll excuse me, sir. Who have you appointed to be your private secretary?

"I haven't appointed anybody. Yes, yes. I know it's highly unusual, but mushroom, mushroom! What's more, I haven't got anybody in mind, either. Some likely chaps here, aren't there?"

"Oh, yes."

"Well, let's have a look at two or three of 'em, shall we say at twelve o'clock?"

"Separately."

"Not a bit. I'll see 'em in a bunch. Send me some notes about them in advance. I say, how did that fellow downstairs know that I'm going to the House of Lords? It isn't in this morning's papers."

"It's about--generally. Timmerson told me."

"When?"

"Yesterday afternoon."

"What time

"About three."

"Well, I'm dashed!" Sam added quickly: "By the way, who's the French national?"

"Mr. Eric Trumbull. He's one of the gentlemen. Has a castle on the Loire, and talks French as well as the French Ambassador."

"And the British national?"

"They're all British, sir."

"I mean the national for Great Britain."

"There's no national for Great Britain. We don't do any propaganda at home."

Sam appeared to reflect.

"Of course not. Not necessary. I wasn't thinking," he said apologetically.

All the time he was saying to himself:

"This fellow Mayden is exactly the same here as he was in his hotel in Manchester. He becomes at once what seems to be intimate. I haven't seen him for years and years. We haven't been together here a quarter of an hour, and we're as thick as thieves! He has a marvellous manner, and he must know from experience that his manner is marvellous, though he's modest by nature. He's deferential and yet he's familiar. He has a sense of fun and enjoys it. I should say he's honest. He's very able, and he knows that too. His business must have made him a good judge of character. The question is, has he judged my character, as a Minister? I gave him to understand I was in favour of 'secretary-general.' Does he think I am? And does he really think I agree that there oughtn't to be a 'national' for Great Britain? I'm going to be the British national myself. Does he think I didn't notice how he told me first he'd first learnt about my appointment in the paper, and then that Timmerson had told him at three o'clock I was to be a peer? The news of my appointment wasn't in the papers at three o'clock. What impression am I making on him? It all depends how I struck him in Manchester. I rather suspect he took me then for a rather simple soul with a flair for money and nothing else. As if millions were made by flair and flukes! That may be his weakness. I hope it is. What I want here for the present is to seem a bit of a genial simpleton, a bit raw and timid, ready to swallow all I'm told and let sleeping dogs lie and so on."

"I suppose you'll see all the nationals in turn, sir?"

"Yes. And I'll start with Mr. Eric Trumbull. But I'll get you to send me in the full roll of the staff to begin with. This place seems to be stiff with celebrities."

The telephone bell rang.

"Shall I answer?" Mayden half got up.

"Don't trouble. Let me inaugurate myself," said Sam, rising. And into the instrument: "Yes. Who? Yes. Speaking. By all means. At once." And to Mayden: "Sir Ernest is coming."

"I'll go then," said Mayden.

"I'm very grateful to you for all you've told me, and also for making straight a pathway before my face," said Sam, smiling humorously.

Mayden put his hand on the knob of the corridor-door, changed his mind and went out by another door leading into another room.

"Doesn't want to meet him in the corridor," thought Sam. "Thinks Timmerson may resent his seeing me first. Some coolness between them."

Like all self-made millionaires, Sam had in his working years developed an exaggerated suspiciousness; he was obsessed by "the underlying motive." In his subsequent years of idleness he had gradually lost a lot of this suspiciousness. It had now developed a second time, and very suddenly. The strangeness of what he had heard excited and invigorated him. He was happy, without reserve, at the prospect of chicane, putting force against force, and of ultimate achievement. Also he meant to stamp himself on the consciousness of the country.

"Well," he murmured aloud in the solitude of the room, "Anyhow, this is something quite, quite new. My God! What a menagerie!"

Sir Ernest Timmerson, a man of about Sam's size and a little younger, had three things large: his reddish face, his grey moustache, his white collar and wristbands. His voice was somewhat squeaky, and marred the effect of a most distinguished morning suit. He entered the Minister's room busily, importantly, and as pompously as speed and a proper regard for his superior would allow. He had papers in his hand. In greeting the Minister he would have patronized him, had he not in spite of himself been restrained by the solemn thought of Sam's wealth. Sir Ernest was in the ordinary sense of the word rich. As the head of a paper combine, he had collected for himself half a million of capital, and he drew from the business perhaps fifteen thousand a year; but in the presence of a millionaire he likened himself to a tarpon swimming by the side of a whale; financially, he knew his place; his own riches gave him a better appreciation of Sam's than the common person could possibly have; for the common person a million is a mere figure, as the earth's distance from Sirius in miles is a mere figure; but Sir Ernest could realize the meaning of a million; moreover, he appraised Sam at quite several millions. Sam also, who had once been worth only half a million, could realize, better than a clerk or a successful barrister, the true importance of Sir Ernest's half-million.

With this visitor Sam kept away from the fire; the desk was the place for the pure functionary type to which Timmerson obviously belonged. Sam put a chair for his second-in-command.

"Please, please!" the second-in-command protested, pained by this condescension. They sat down opposite each other.

"Well, my dear Raingo," said Sir Ernest, leaning back and stroking a thigh with one hand and lifting eye-glasses from nose with the other. "Quite apart from the fact that I think the Cabinet have made an admirable choice-- you will allow me to say so, I'm delighted you're here among us. I'm relieved. I've had sole responsibility here for three weeks now, and I'm very relieved to relinquish it."

"That," replied Sam curtly (but to himself), "is a thundering lie. You hate relinquishing it. You've had three of the happiest weeks of your life, and you resent my appointment." And aloud he said with a grave smile: "My dear Timmerson, I want you to understand, right from the start, that I count on you. You must know far more about this job than I do or ever can, and I shall always rely on your service. You say you're relieved. Well, so am I. I can't tell you how relieved I am to find that you are here. Don't think I'm trying to flatter you. I know you're above flattery." And to himself: "You'd swallow anything."

Sir Ernest waved away these compliments with curves of the eye-glasses in the air.

"I hope Mayden will look after you," said he.

"He will," said Sam. "By to-morrow morning I shall have the machinery of this room in order."

"Quite. I hinted to Mayden what ought to be done, and I'm sure he'll do it. He takes things rather easily, but I must say he's reliable enough. By the way, there's this." He passed across the desk a document marked 'Secret.' "Of course it's been coming to me, but henceforward it will come to you, I need hardly say."

Sam had never before seen the word "Secret" on a document, and the child in him was thrilled. The paper contained the minutes of the previous day's Cabinet meeting. Sam read them at once. No mention of an offer of the ministry to Samuel Raingo

"Um! Yes, yes. Just so. I had a long talk with Clyth yesterday," he murmured casually, and dropped the paper, when he tore it up, took it to the fire, and burnt the pieces, and returned to the desk. "Safe side," said he, with a solemn face.

"Do you think that's best?" squeaked Sir Ernest, impressed.

"Well, there may be spies even here."

"Spies!"

"I hear there's a possibility--I've been warned." Sam spoke firmly. The gesture of burning had delighted his sense of humour, and to see Sir Ernest impressed gave him joy.

"Er--er--there are one or two matters on which I should like to take your decision," said Sir Ernest, recovering himself, but not sufficiently to enable him to discuss the surprising spy conjecture with any confidence.

"Whatever you think best, I shall endorse."

"Well, I happen to know a young fellow in one of the M.I. sections of the War Office, and he told me last night at dinner that an order had been issued at the War Office that no officer of his section--and no doubt of other sections--was on any pretext whatever to enter our building."

Sam had a strong impulse to burst out laughing at this piece of information. Had Mayden been sitting opposite to him instead of Sir Ernest he would without doubt have laughed heartily, and Mayden also; but he was restrained by the functionary's solemn majesty and lack of humour; he knew that by laughing he might prejudice himself, the Ministry, even the successful conduct of the war, and also he would outrage the feelings of a worthy man.

"What's M.I. short for?" he asked modestly.

"Military Intelligence."

"And was it yesterday the order was--er--issued?"

"Apparently so. That was what I gathered."

Sam had a vision of a few highly-placed fellows sitting together in the vast home of the War Department, clanking spurs, and cogitating how they could get one in against these infernal mushroom ministries that were multiplying all around and appropriating sacred, traditional privileges, and having the damned cheek to try to help to win the war. Too proud to be jealous, these brahmins, and yet as raging jealous as the rivals of a favourite concubine in a harem! Germans they could understand and respect, Austrians they could like, but these dirty outsiders, from interfering Andy Clyth downwards, they detested and hated. The order was probably a hit at himself--rascally company-promoting millionaire with no father, no public-school, no style.

Yes! And he had a wider vision--of every ministry, historic or mushroom, snarling at every other ministry, regarding every other ministry as an imposed evil to be suffered as little as possible and scotched as much as possible, and ferociously determined to protect its rights and its monopoly with the last drop of its blood. The only real war was in Whitehall; the war in Flanders and France was merely a game, a sort of bloody football. Sam was amused, and without bitterness. It was shocking of him to be amused, but he was amused. He had been born without the precious faculty for righteous indignation. He thought simply: "This is what human nature is."

"It's a calculated insult to another ministry," said Sir Ernest.

The portentous personage showed that he was capable of genuine indignation. In a few months or years he had grown to love and cherish his own ministry. His voice might squeak, but it also trembled. And yet Sam knew that if Sir Ernest had worn spurs and worked in Whitehall he would have promulgated with zeal just such an order as that against which he was now protesting with all the power of his soul.

"Yes," Sam breathed mildly.

"The question is: What ought to be done?"

"I suppose you couldn't go over yourself and tackle 'em about it--have it out with 'em? I'd back you," Sam suggested. "Of course you agree with me that this spirit must be checked."

"Most certainly. If only for the sake of pulling all together in the war."

"I shall remember that 'if only' to my dying day," thought Sam; and said: "Yes."

"But," said Sir Ernest, "if I may say so, I think it would be better for you to go yourself. You're the Minister."

"Quite. But that's just why I doubt whether I ought to go myself. You see, if I go I shall have to see the Minister. A minister, I take it, must see a minister."

"Quite right! Quite right!" Sir Ernest eagerly concurred.

"And I'm not sure if I ought to trouble the Minister on what's after all only a matter of domestic, inter-departmental politics." Sam added to himself: "I'm catching the spirit of the affair rather well."

Once again Sir Ernest was impressed by Sam's ministerial deportment.

"I agree," said he reflectively. "But if that's the case, as it is, Mayden is the proper person to handle it."

The great functionary was afraid; he was intimidated by the overpowering prestige of the ancient rival ministry. He dared not, on such a mission, enter those granite halls and affront the grim bearers of oak leaves and clankers of spurs. Sam was sorry for him because he had given himself away, divulged the secret infirmity of his character.

"I doubt whether I should care to leave it to Mayden," he said. Sir Ernest snapped up the subtle flattery. "I tell you what. I'll have a word with Clyth before we do anything at all."

He knew that if he chose he could call the bluff of those fellows in Whitehall. Wait till he was safe in the House of Lords. For a moment he felt grim, revengeful, malicious. What a show-down he could stage the next time Secret Service money was wanted! Then he privately laughed. He would be a minister in the grand magnanimous manner. He would rise easily above inter-departmental strife. Besides, the order seemed to him to be trivial, comic, and he did not care a pin whether it was rescinded or not. The rest of Sir Ernest's interview with his chief interested neither of them; and presently, having settled his collar and his cuffs and his moustache, Sir Ernest departed, not ill-pleased with the new chief.

Mr. Eric Trumbull, summoned the first of all the nationals to meet the new Minister, entered as one who had heard fearsome tales of his chief. Sam saw apprehension on his pale, refined face, was both pleased and sorry, and at once reassured him. He was a very tall man, as thin as a pole, and his necktie and handkerchief showed a certain desire to obtain harmonious effects of delicate colours. About forty-five years of age, he had been born an American citizen, but had lived nearly all his life in Europe, and on the declaration of war had enthusiastically become a British citizen--in order to help. His passion was the architecture and art of France, to the study of which he had given his whole existence, with no ulterior end of achieving fame by imparting his knowledge to the Anglo-Saxon in books. He had no trace whatever of an American accent and no Americanisms of manner. Despite nervousness, he was the very perfection of deportment. Sam soon gathered that he was rich, but belonged to the type which feels no interest in money so long as it has a great deal more than it can possibly need. He had never had to get money, nor to fight for anything except pictures in sale-rooms. His admiration for French civilization was boundless.

"And what have you got there?" asked Sam.

Mr. Trumbull displayed a map of France, irregularly marked with red dots.

"I am establishing committees for British propaganda throughout France," answered Mr. Trumbull modestly. "You will see, sir, that some districts are rather blank at present, but I already have committees in one hundred and twenty-three towns, and my ambition is to reach two hundred. I want that map to be red all over--except of course in the occupied territories. I think I shall do it," he added.

"If the war lasts long enough," said Sam, with a kind but enigmatic smile. "What are your committees supposed to do?"

"Well, sir, we supply them with material, and they use it in the way they think best, according to local peculiarities. Of course I often make suggestions to them. I happen to have travelled in every part of France. I've been wondering whether it wouldn't be a good plan for me to make a personal tour. I think I could promise that if I did that map would look very different within a few weeks. You see in the neighbourhood of Grenoble, which I know intimately, there is scarcely a dot. I could----"

"Um!" Sam murmured, stopping him by inattention, and pretending to examine the map with minute care. (What he did examine was the marvellously manicured finger-nails of Mr. Trumbull's hand holding one side of the map.)

Here was yet another war, Mr. Trumbull's own war, and the operations thereof were shown by masses of red dots. Every red dot was a victory, and Mr. Trumbull hoped to win two hundred victories. Mr. Trumbull had invented this war, and in the activity of his mind there was no other war; all the other wars were phantasmal for Mr. Trumbull, who in a frenzy of military ardour having taken out his British letters of nationalization, was now by pertinacity and sheer faith daily fulfilling an honourable ambition. And withal he could find time to attend gloriously to his finger-nails! Mr. Trumbull was no ordinary man.

"And what kind of material do you supply to these committees of yours?"

"Oh, all kinds, It depends--"

"Well, give me an example."

"Well, at the moment I am having prepared an illustrated article on English gardens. You see, the educated French have contempt for what we call here 'landscape gardening.' They think that a garden ought to be formal, as of course according to all tradition, French, Italian, Spanish, even German, it ought to be. They don't know that England possesses some of the very finest specimens of formal gardens in the world, and I intend to enlighten them on this point."

Sam could not completely hide his amazement. He thought:

"Somebody has gone mad in this room. Is it me? Here we are in the worst period of the worst war in history, and--and--!"

No, he could not continue even to himself. Mr. Trumbull's own private war was too fantastically absurd to be discussed.

"But do you really think--" he stammered.

"That such an article will do good in the relations between the two countries?" Mr. Trumbull loftily finished Sam's sentence for him. "Undoubtedly. Propaganda, if I may say so, is an extremely subtle enterprise. Whatever else it may be it must not be crude, which is another way of saying that it must not be direct. I venture to conceive that anything which increases the respect of the French intelligentsia--a very numerous class indeed--for us cannot fail to do good--and lasting good." Mr. Trumbull spoke with firmness, with authority. He had ceased to be nervous. His refined, somewhat finicking tone exhibited, subtly, a certain condescension towards Sam; seemed to imply that he, Mr. Trumbull, belonged to the intelligentsia, whereas the excellent and worthy Sam did not; seemed to be saying: "Here is another poor barbarian who does not understand."

Sam was rebellious; he forgot that Mr. Trumbull was born so and was entitled to the idiosyncrasy of his individuality; he wanted to crush Mr. Trumbull by the exercise of autocratic power and fling him into the street; he yearned to restore ordinary British common sense to her throne in the French department of the Ministry. But the autocrat was a little intimidated; the barbarian uncomfortably felt that possibly he was indeed a barbarian. Supposing that there was after all something in Mr. Trumbull's superfine theories! Anyhow, Mr. Trumbull, if subtly insolent, was without question subtly courageous.

"I say," Sam began in a new tone, pushing away the map. "You keep an eye on the French daily papers?"

"Yes, sir."

"You've noticed how Anglophobe some of them are?"

"I'm sorry to say I have."

"You've not tried to do anything about it?"

"Well, sir, what is there to do?"

"What about bribery? Is there a paper in Paris that can't be bought?"

Mr. Trumbull did not quail for one instant before the terrible word.

"I should say there most decidedly was, sir. But in any case I have nothing to do with those methods. They're a Secret Service affair, and I have no information."

Sam spoke more gently:

"Did you ever make a collection of the most outrageous of these Anglophobe utterances that everybody seems to take as a matter of course?"

"No, sir."

"Well, I did. Here it is." Sam drew from his pocket a long slip of paper with cuttings pasted on to it. "Just read these."

Mr. Trumbull, glancing at his chief with a new, uneasy eye, took the paper.

"Yes," he murmured, when he had finished reading. "Yes. Deplorable."

"I'd like you to have a good lively translation made of all that, Trumbull. By three o'clock. If you can oblige me."

"Yes, sir. I'll do it myself."

"I'll be grateful." And Sam stopped Mr. Trumbull as he was leaving the presence. "You might get out a scheme for that tour of yours," he said with much geniality. His notion was to exile Mr. Trumbull from England and especially from the Burleigh Hotel.

"Did I score or did he?" Sam asked himself, when he was alone. He could not definitely answer the question. He might exile Mr. Trumbull with an almighty gesture; he might run British propaganda in France according to the dictates of British rough, bluff, common sense. But was Mr. Trumbull right with his subtleties, and was Sam in the way to be a coarse blunderer? Sam turned to the question of the ministerial secretariat.

Between half-past one and two, after a morning of almost sensational excitements borne with praiseworthy exterior calmness, Sam had to satisfy an empty stomach. He felt lonely. He had not asked anybody to lunch with him; and of course nobody had dared to ask him to lunch, it being naturally assumed that the great man would have mysterious and important appointments in the highest places. So that he was left forlorn, hungering for companionship, and full of the envious, unhappy feeling that everyone in the Ministry had human ties except himself. Once more he was failing to achieve the dreamed-of ministerial ideal.

However, he managed to walk out of the building with brisk dignity, as one knowing exactly whither he was bound and what he had to do. But because he, in fact, knew neither of these things he dismissed the waiting car which he had allocated to himself, smiling very amiably at the tight-clad girl in charge of it, and turned smartly down to the Thames Embankment, where he could make a decision in peace.

Already he felt as if he had been in the Ministry for weeks. He had had practically no previous experience of administration except the administration of his own private affairs. For, although he had bought and sold vast undertakings, he had learnt little about any of them beyond what might emerge from a ruthless, critical examination of their books of account; and he knew that one might even for a brief period preside over the destinies of an industrial enterprise as Chairman of the Board and still remain ignorant of the daily human realities which were the material of its success. Nevertheless he considered that he had begun to get the hang of the Ministry, to envisage it as an entire organism and understand its mode of functioning.

He had selected a secretary, an assistant-secretary, and a nice, soothing, plump stenographer. He had mastered the system of "Minutes" which circulated from section to section, adding to themselves marginal notes in black and marginal notes in red, and which stood for all time as a record of what particular official had decided or suggested on a particular question at a particular moment. He had dictated minutes; he had dictated a letter. He had surveyed the diary of the conferences which apparently formed a large share of the activities of the Ministry. He had carefully read through the brilliant roll of the staff and had a chat with one popular novelist and with the austere, precise poet who was in charge of "Cables." Various other persons, male and female, had been presented to him, and he had had encounters in corridors. He knew what the interiors of the offices looked like; he was acquiring the vocabulary and idiom of the place; he was separating in his mind the cheerful from the grumblers, the willing from the unwilling, and those who could think straight from those who could not. A full morning, at the end of which he was saying to himself, as he reached the Embankment:

"No! New brooms must not sweep clean. No! New brooms must not sweep clean."

He saw the delicacy and the difficulties of his task. He saw that he must moderate the eagerness of his ambition. He had supreme power, but there was no such thing as supreme power, and indeed all his wariness and force would be needed to prevent the nominal master from becoming the slave of the Ministry.

"Shall I lunch at the Savoy or at the Club?" he asked himself, hunger increasing. But he knew that he would lunch at the Savoy; the self-consciousness of the newly-appointed Minister would keep him out of the Club. Everybody would discreetly glance at him, while pretending not to do so, as he entered the Club coffee-room, and he would not be natural; he might blush. Besides, the cronies would be there--he had met one of them, Drakefield, during the morning--and they might expect him to sit at their table, and he positively would not sit at their table. He wanted to be alone and not to be alone, or he wanted to be with people who did not know that he was a raw Minister. But, on the other hand, the Savoy! The Savoy was equally impossible. He could not, after the previous night, bear the Savoy.

So he walked to and fro, secure from observation in the traffic, still persuading himself that he was undecided, and affecting to be interested in the phenomena of the thoroughfare. At any rate in the street you knew by a hundred signs that the country was at war. The contents-bills of the papers-printed, because of the paper-famine, on old sheets of the papers themselves, just as in former days at Eccles--proved that. Whereas within the self-absorbed Ministry--except for an occasional uniform--there was no symptom of war; all was administration, conferences, minutes, literary composition. In three hours and a half he had scarcely heard a mention of the war.

As he entered the foyer of the Savoy Grill he saw Sid Jenkin coming out of a telephone-box.

"'Ello, Sam," Jenkin greeted him. "I was just giving you up." This was the first time Sid had addressed him by his Christian name. Sam felt flattered, and disliked being flattered. "I 'phoned you at the Ministry, and they said you'd be sure to be either here or at your club."

"Oh!" said Sam, wondering by what right anybody at the Ministry was entitled to divine so accurately his views on resorts; but underlings by some magic always know everything about your movements.

"Yes. So I rang up the club. You weren't there. So I came here, and you weren't here either. Let's have a bite, shall we?"

Sid Jenkin tossed his grey hat to a menial and, putting his thumbs into the waistcoat of his creased tweed suit, strode in front of Sam into the grill-room.

"I've never been in 'ere before," he remarked loudly.

Sam thought:

"Has Andy sent him to find out how I'm getting on?"

But he was glad to see Sid. Sid was the solution of the luncheon problem.

"She was there last night," he reflected, looking at a certain table as they sat down. But he tried to put the thought away from him, as being melodramatic or sentimental; the room must be only a room and the table only a table. Moreover, though the place was much fuller than on the previous evening, and though there were many women, of all sorts and all degrees of attractiveness, it was not under the sinister dominion of Aphrodite as at night; eyes were not speaking equivocally to eyes, nor gestures to gestures; colours were severer, languor was absent; the atmosphere was astringent, bracing, unfavourable to the mysterious works of the goddess. Further, the morning's work had had the effect of somewhat calming Sam's secret agitation and softening his resentment. And yet he was still in a dangerous state; the lava was still darkly boiling far down beneath the crust apparently so firm.

At a neighbouring table sat an old man, far older than Sam, with a youngish, stylish woman. But the old man was sure of himself, had no visible consciousness of the difference in their ages; that was because he was very slim and moved his head and limbs youthfully; and Sam thought:

"I wish I was slim."

The desire to be slim was passionate in him for a few moments: such was his state.

The two Ministers received at first no attention whatever from the staff. Sid Jenkin, fretted by his sense of importance, grew restless. At last he called out sharply in a voice so loud that quite a number of people turned to look at the disturber of restaurant conventions. A shocked member of the upper caste of waiters sprang forward with a glance half soothing and half protesting. As if the caste had not already enough to worry them with the twice-daily performance of the miracle of the loaves and fishes, and the pain of asking important, wealthy customers to produce those humiliating food-cards!

"See here, mate," said Sid Jenkin, with a sudden smiling geniality that entirely nullified the sharpness of his summons:

"My name's Jenkin. Sid Jenkin. I'm a member of the War Cabinet, and I'm expecting an important telephone call. See that there's no delay with the 'phone. And we want something to eat quick. 'Ave ye got any asparagus?"

The hieratic Italian bowed with immense respect, and respectfully greeted Sam, whom he knew by sight. In another moment waiters were fussing round the table like flies.

"I'm not expecting any telephone call at all," said Sid to Sam. "But it's a good way of letting 'em know who y'are. I 'adn't used to be so refined--I mean refayned. I'd tell 'em who I was, straight out. But I'm learning. Oh, I'm learning." He was obviously enjoying himself. He went on: "I'm the only member of the Cabinet as goes about freely. P'raps its part of my job. All the others keep themselves mysterious. Not my line. I've often said I'd come 'ere one day. And 'ere I am. I've worked on the coalface and gone 'ome black and 'ad me bath in me kitchen, and now 'ere I am 'aving a bite with a millionaire, and I'm in the War Cabinet and 'e isn't. What about it?"

Impossible to be offended by Sid's crudity. Nothing that Sid ever said ever offended anyone, and he would say anything and everything.

"This man is living in a wonderland," thought Sam, and he liked him the more for living in a wonderland. He had reached wonderland less by his brains--though he could make marvellously adroit and telling speeches in difficult situations--than by his individuality.

Sid wanted asparagus, and in due time he got it--six thin stalks were held to be a portion in the midst of a so-called food famine. He began to eat it with his fingers.

"I never use them things," he said, pointing to the special utensil for handling asparagus. "I find as it isn't done. I was dining with Ockelford t'other night, and he didn't use them. I only learnt about asparagus not long since, and now I make a point of losing no opportunity of getting used to it. I took some 'ome in a bit o' paper to my missus the night before last. ''ere's a bit o' sparrow grass, missis,' I said. Slavey came in while I was eating it, and caught me picking it up with my fingers. Next morning she says to my missis, so missis told me, ' 'Ow does master eat 'is sparrowgrass when 'e's out with company, mum?' says she."

He laughed. Sam laughed heartily. He guessed that Sid had ordered asparagus solely in order to give full value to the story. Nobody knew better than Sid the importance of introducing a good story properly.

"And why are you and I lunching together to-day, Sid?" Sam demanded quietly, but grimly.

Sid's eyes glinted.

"Well, lad, I thought as ye might like a bit o' moral support on your first day. I knew damn' well Andy hadn't given ye much."

"So he repented and sent you along, eh, to see how things were going?"

"He did not," said Sid, firmly and seriously. "But I told 'im I might look ye up, and 'e was quite willing. Ye know, Andy believes in ye. It was 'is own idea choosing you. 'e respects ye. 'e says he knows ye'll come through. 'e don't much like this peerage business, but now it's decided 'e wants it finished up quick. It's going to be in to-morrow's papers, perhaps in the Gazette to-night. 'Ow did ye get on this morning?"

"I got on all right," said Sam. "But how about the peerage business? What do I do? Who makes the first move? Do I? Has it anything to do with the College of Heralds? I'm quite ignorant."

"So am I. But listen here now. I shall be at No. 10 to-night. You come with me, and we'll put Poppleham or someone on to it."

"But surely the P.M. doesn't keep open house at night. I can't go unless he asks me."

"Rot!" said Sid shortly. "I'm like the old King of Denmark. I go about unattended among the people. Andy's like Lewis the Fourteenth. He loves to 'ave his court around 'im. And you're from Eccles too! And I might 'ave something to tell ye about that son of yours to-night. Oh! I've got it in 'and, trust me. I might 'ear any minute. You come along o' me to-night and you'll 'ear nice things about the Man Power Bill! Such a mess! Andy's furious. But you tell 'im just what ye think."

At that moment a waiter came up to inform Sid that he was wanted at the telephone. Sid was startled and his gaze questioned Sam's. While he was gone Sam argued with himself whether his dignity would permit him to go to No. 10 uninvited and as the protégé of Sid Jenkin. He decided that it would. He wondered whether he dared to try to find out from Andy why Andy had waited till the year 1918 before enlisting the services of the man whom he so liked and respected.

"The old lady is seriously ill," Sid murmured very excitedly, returning.

"Who?"

"Mrs.. Clyth."

"His wife?"

"Bless ye no! His mother. She's staying at No. 10 and she's 'ad one of 'er attacks--don't know exactly what they are. 'e worships her--fair worships 'er. A fat lot 'e'll care for 'is Man Power Bill now! Look 'ere. I must slip off sharp. It's your lunch, isn't it?"

"Yes," said Sam. "It's my lunch all right. To-night will be off, then?"

"Of course it won't be off. 'e'll want everybody to call and see 'ow the old lady is."

"Very well, then. Ring me up. As far as that goes I've known Mrs. Clyth for fifty years if not more."

Sam was impressed and a little disturbed by the almost violent effect on Sid Jenkins of the news about the old Mrs. Clyth. He had a dim memory of her in the late seventies, and he seemed vaguely to recollect that even in those days the bellicose boy Andy had a special attitude towards her. Sam had completely forgotten her; had probably assumed that she was long dead; in the earliest days he had never thought of her as other than old. And here, across the immeasurable stretch of time and marvellous change, she was surviving--and so influentially! Sam was awed.

As he paid the bill, with a negligently magnificent tip, his soul went back to the narrow houses of Eccles, and the goodly virtues for which Mrs. Clyth had stood and doubtless still stood. The susceptible fellow was inspired anew to serious and wholehearted endeavour. He regretted the idleness of years. He must do his very best with the Ministry; his methods might perhaps prove to be questionable to the old-fashioned, but his aims would be above reproach. He had ordered the French translation for three o'clock. He would be back in his room at a minute to three and at three o'clock precisely he would ring for Mr. Trumbull.

At the end of a very active ministerial afternoon Sam said a cheerful good-bye to Sir Ernest Timmerson on the steps of the hotel. Sir Ernest had almost fully recovered the sense of his ability to guide towards triumph not merely the Ministry but the entire operations of war. Sam had closely examined the financial system of the organism over which he presided: the secretaries had proved sympathetic. The two cronies of the Club had paid him a visit, separately. And in general Sam, though anxious to criticize himself and the Ministry adversely, had to admit that the day had been satisfactory. But he had, as he foresaw, been forced to adjust his ruthless ministerial ambitions to the plain facts of the interior of the Burleigh Hotel: a process which pained him at first, and soon afterwards gave him a pleasing relief. He perceived the folly, and also the impossibility of setting the Thames on fire; he despised the simple Sam of the previous afternoon.

Further, he had a new feeling of responsibility, which frightened him. Several times in his life, in the midst of temerarious negotiations on a very large scale, he had been frightened by glimpses of ruin out of his left eye; but never half so frightened as now, after a placid initiation into his Ministry. The responsibility grew upon his mind; it was terrific. However, it had the effect of freeing him from the more general responsibility of a citizen. He said, lightly scanning the still formidable war news: "Ah well, that's their affair! I can't be bothered about it. They've got their job and I've got mine, and mine's all I can manage." He washed his hands of everything else.

At the flat the maid, who was tidying Adela's bedroom, gave him a message, in a rather melting, compassionate voice which implied all her hostility to Adela, that her mistress had failed to get him on the telephone and had returned to the country.

"Yes, I was afraid she might have to go," Sam lied, accustomed to Adela's vagaries and to the diplomatic task of making them seem quite natural and proper to the world. He liked the idea of being alone, but was apprehensive of what being alone might involve for himself.

The accumulated mail of the day comprised a considerable number of congratulations--some from people of whom he had not heard for years--and a few appeals for posts in the Ministry; also a letter, conceived in odiously submissive terms, offering either to make his peer's robes or to lend him robes on hire; also a thick green bundle of press cuttings, which he read with the greatest care and then put away in a drawer. He had nothing to do till half-past nine. There was no alternative but to go to Orange Street. It was Adela's fault. Had she stayed by him--instead of wandering off to the East Coast to discuss (with dignity) that peerage among her bridge-playing and golfing acquaintances--he would have stayed by her. But now he must positively go to Orange Street. Although he dreaded going more than he desired to go, he could invent no excuse for not going. He owed it to himself to go.

Night had completely fallen in Orange Street. He had the same sense of unwisdom and shame as on the previous evening--he the responsible Minister carrying on a liaison with a poor little nobody, etc. etc.--but to-night the discomfort of his conscience was intensified. It was intensified, strangely enough, by the thought of old Mrs. Clyth and all that she stood for--all those forgotten standards of right and wrong. What would old Mrs. Clyth think of him could she know? And it was intensified by the thought of his high resolves to do his very best in the role to which he had been called. And lastly it was intensified by the thought of the years--especially the war years--which he had spent in idleness, sulking, yes, sulking! He was alive now; he was born again. Was his new life to be soiled . . . horrid, silly, sentimental! He must go, because in Orange Street he had a responsibility, not only to Delphine but to himself.

He furtively unfastened the door and climbed the flights of stairs. And he trembled for the upshot of the visit. He was far more perturbed than when, two nights earlier, Delphine had locked the bedroom door behind her. He hesitated on the landing at the sitting-room door. Ought he not to warn her by some noise of his arrival! He always did so. Yet why should he? This was his home. She continually insisted that it was his home. She loved him to refer to it as his home. A man was entitled to enter his home as he chose. He opened the door quietly, and saw in the sitting-room a table charmingly set for a meal for two.

Jealousy leapt up furious and gigantic, and instantly killed everything else in his mind. It had lain there, growling, or in silence sullenly watchful from side to side, ever since the previous evening. Now it was rampant, and far more powerful than he could have imagined. The sensation of its tyrannic mastery was appalling. The Minister was dead; righteous aspiration was no more; shame was no more; old Mrs. Clyth was a silly legend. This girl then--had she the damnable impudence to arrange to entertain her young officer in Sam's home? Did she count so surely, and with that lack of the sense of danger so characteristic of women, upon the absence of her lawful lover?

He had not written to her; he had had no communication with her since the brief talks on the telephone twenty-four hours earlier. What exactly had he said to her? He tried to recall the very words. Certainly he had told her that he could not come on the previous evening. That had been quite clear. But had he said with equal clearness that he could not come on the day following, or had she understood him to say as much! That was it: she had got the thing wrong on the telephone; and she was relying on his habitual cast-iron adherence to programme. Was the young jackanapes with her now in the next room? He took off his overcoat--gesture symbolic of a boxer tripping for a dust-up.

Hats and overcoats had to be hung on the landing. There was no place for them in the poky little hall itself. Not a foot of space to spare! Here was a grievance against her. Why should his chosen and spoiled mistress insist on living in two rooms, plus a preposterous dwarf kitchen and ditto bath-room, with a half-time domestic, when she might have had every luxury of space and service? She had given the war as an excuse for her obstinacy. War be damned! She would have shown the same obstinacy had there been no war. Because she was like that! Adela had no ambition, and Delphine had no ambition. He supposed that a man always, by some unfathomable instinct, selected women with the same characteristics! He had read that somewhere. He did not see the monstrous absurdity of his idea. No two women could have been more different from one another than Adela and Delphine. But for Sam in that moment they were alike.

Having disposed of his hat and coat, he returned into the room. And immediately afterwards Delphine appeared.

She had a tray in her hands and was wearing a foolish, fluffy white apron, about the size of a fig leaf, a stylish, alluring conventionalization of a parlourmaid's apron. And Sam, even in his wrath, could not deny that it was indeed alluring. He was conscious of extreme agitation, and, beginning at once to act a part, he winked slyly at her, as a man who has not a care and is utterly content. She smiled sadly--he could see that she was in one of her dark moods, put down the tray on a chair, clasped him in her arms, and kissed him. He did not kiss; his considerable power of acting would not go so far; he allowed himself to be kissed.

Here she was, round about him, with the amplitude of an epical heroine or a goddess, with her curves and her bare forearms, and her fingers ringed in his costly jewellery, with her faint sweet odour, with her passionate, strong individuality burning secretly beneath a contemplative languor. . . . She shut her eyes and kissed him. Well, whatever else she might be, she was a marvellous phenomenon.

Strange: jealousy had deprived him of the faculty of judging evidence; jealousy had nothing to do with reason, and it would not suffer the operations of reason. Ordinarily he could see and hear a person and weigh pros and cons, and bring to bear his experience of human nature, and arrive at a decision concerning the problem of that person which fairly satisfied him and which he would maintain unless and until further evidence persuaded him of error. But now he could arrive at no decision. He knew she was guilty; he fancied she might be innocent. He was convinced she was acting; it was impossible that she should be acting. Her demeanour implied one thing, but it also implied the opposite.

The sole certainty in the situation was that he was extremely, torturingly unhappy and fearful--as pathetic as an unhappy child. Yet he would not, if he could, have wiped her out of his life. The awful affliction which she caused was precious and vitalizing. To remove it by violence would produce a void still more excruciating.

"Is this for us?" he asked lightly, quizzically, pointing to the set table.

"Of course."

"But you didn't know I was coming."

"Yes I did."

"But I didn't know myself half an hour ago."

"Ah! But I knew."

She was another of your mystical women, with secret, psychic sources of knowledge. The frequently-proved unreliability of these sources never weakened her faith in them.

"I can't stay. I have to see the Prime Minister."

"But you must eat."

"Yes. I suppose I must eat somewhere."

"If you hadn't come I should have done the same to-morrow night. And I shall--every night, unless, of course, you say you know you can't come. You won't be able to go to restaurants so much now--I understand that. So I want you to feel there's always a meal waiting for you here. I'm just going to warm the soup. Everything else will be cold--but I think you like that."

She disappeared into the bedroom. In her absurd flat the kitchen could be entered only through the bedroom, and the bath-room only through the kitchen.

Alone, he saw clearly that his suspicions about the destination of the dinner were completely preposterous. She could not conceivably have been expecting anybody else. He had been wrong, and ridiculously wrong. The realization of this gave him ease for a moment, until he remembered--where was his presence of mind?--that the allaying of the suspicion about the dinner could have no effect upon the far more serious suspicion concerning her rendezvous at the Savoy on the previous night. The more serious suspicion remained intact and terrible, and nothing could possibly allay it. Why, if she was innocent, had she not told him instantly of her visit to the Savoy? Well, he must give her a chance. . . . But of course she would not tell him instantly; it would be necessary for her to prepare the ground, so as to make the rendezvous seem the most natural thing in the world. . . . Supposing she did not tell him? That would be the end of all.

She brought the soup in two bowls, one in either hand. She untied her foolish apron.

"Fold it up, darling, and hide it under the cushion of the easy chair." She smiled exquisitely.

He took the unimaginably flimsy thing--part of herself--and did as he was told. A damnably clever notion of hers for quickening intimacy! Guilty, she was determined to surpass herself in the craft of ravishing him. They sat down. Stretching out her arm she extinguished one of the lamps. There were moments when, despite the courage of her beauty, she loved twilight.

"Now tell me. You've been working too hard."

"No."

"But I say yes."

"How do you know?"

"Your eyes are tired. Oh! Darling! I do hope you'll be sensible."

"I shall be sensible."

"But will you?"

There was intense solicitude in her tone. But naturally she didn't want anything to happen to him. He was her support. She had no other. She needed his money to be hospitable to her young men. Horrible minutes! When was she going to tell him of her visit to the Savoy? Would she tell him in the next sentence? Or the next after that?

She inquired minutely concerning his day. She rained questions upon him. But of course this was her old trick, the well-known feminine device of feigning an insatiable interest in the man and pretending that her own doings were of the last unimportance compared with his great, enthralling works.

And also she was very discreet; they always were. Her curiosity was confined strictly to himself. She never referred to his wife; she would not worry him. As for Geoffrey, he had had no opportunity of telling her about the hopeful rumours concerning Geoffrey. He replied to her questions rather grudgingly, but lightly.

Did he feel anything wrong with his heart? Was he sure? She made him promise that he would see his London doctor every week. But he promised as it were under duress and did not hold himself quite bound. When, if ever, would she tell him about her visit to the Savoy last night?

The meal was attractive. After the soup, fish mayonnaise. A cold chicken, entire. (How had she wangled that?) A salad. A fruit-tart. A crême-caramel. A tiny cheese in silver paper. Some claret. She must have got everything ready cooked at some stores. He drank the soup, but only coquetted with the fish. The chicken he looked askance at. She was alarmed.

The fact was that beneath his light demeanour he was too miserable to eat. His appetite was gone. To swallow made him feel sick. She came round the table to him, put an arm round his neck, speared a bit of chicken on a fork and enchantingly offered it to his mouth. He had to accept it. Another exquisite gesture; but of course all part of the siren business. When would she make up her mind to tell him about her visit to the Savoy?

He asked about Gwen. Oh! Gwen would be all right. Gwen was to have a situation in a shop at Kingston. She did not encourage his curiosity about Gwen; nor, later, about her canteen work. His state grew worse. Time was passing; he foresaw the moment when he would have to leave her without having heard a word from her lips about the visit to the Savoy. He could not bear to contemplate that moment. He refused to contemplate it.

He took a cigarette. In a second she was striking a match for him. He pulled himself together for a supreme histrionic effort, and, smiling at her through the smoke, with the cigarette between his lips, he said to her casually and agreeably:

"I hear you were at the Savoy last night in the grill-room."

She had not told him. He had had to force her to an avowal. His happiness was forever ruined.

"Yes," she answered, with a sudden note of sadness in her voice, but unhesitatingly and simply, "I did go. For supper. With a man I used to know. He started in the ranks, but he's just got a commission--he didn't want it, only he thought he oughtn't to refuse it. He's going back to the front to-night again. I met him just outside in the street here. Yesterday afternoon. I asked him up. Of course I had to tell him I was secretary to a company. That was just before you telephoned to me the second time. In fact he was here when you telephoned. If you'd telephoned a bit later I shouldn't have gone with him because I shouldn't have known you weren't coming. I wondered whether you would think I was rather queer on the telephone. But you see him being here, in the room--I had to be careful, hadn't I?"

"You certainly had," Sam agreed.

She had given him an account of the affair which at any rate fitted the true facts so, far as Sam knew them. But why had she not told him earlier? And why had she offered no explanation of her failure to tell him? Would she ever have told him, had he not compelled her to do so? He was too proud to ask her for the explanation of her secretiveness. There might be a good one, or at least a plausible one, but he could not bring himself to demand it. He waited. She seemed thoughtful, and said nothing. His suspicions were somewhat lulled, but assuredly not killed. Women in her case were so clever, persuasive, so skilled in wearing the mask of innocence.

"Who told you I was there, Sam?" she questioned, again quite simply. "Is there anybody knows I know you?"

"Ah!" said Sam, roguishly and benevolently, raising a finger. "Wouldn't you like to hear? Well, nobody told me. I saw you there myself. I had to go to the Savoy on some business, and it just happened I saw you--one glimpse. I was sitting in the entrance hall and you and your friend went past me. That was all."

Naturally he would not tell her the whole truth. Part of what he told her was true, but it was highly misleading. While expecting perfect candour from her, he held himself justified in having misled her; for he was still by no means convinced of her candour. She had beyond any doubt deceived him, for instance, as to her age. Perhaps from a fine motive. But perhaps also from a base motive. She might have argued with herself that had he known her to be as young as she actually was he would have turned from her before it was too late, in a fright at the immense difference between their ages. In his mind suspicion bred suspicion at a tremendous birth-rate.

"Darling," she murmured, sitting down plump on his knee, and burying her nose in his cheek. "You don't object to me going out like that, do you?"

He put his head back and looked her in the face.

"Object!" he chid her, kindly. "Of course I don't object. Why should I object?" He hated her to suppose him capable of so mean a thing as jealousy; he so large-minded, so much her superior! And he followed the train of thought by which he had excused her to himself on the previous night. "I should be awfully sorry if I thought you didn't consider yourself free to have your own friends and to live your own life. A nice thing it would be if I insisted on cutting you off from the world! What sort of a fellow do you take me for?"

She kissed him in silence.

His own words had reassured him about his nice-mindedness and freedom from pettiness. He now wanted to believe in her absolute honesty, and he did believe in it, by an act of will; and by an act of will he drove away every suspicion. She kissed him again. Bliss rose: clouds of a delicious drug that sweetly overcame him. He thought: "I ought to fight this influence." But he would and could not fight it. A marvellous relief filled the whole of his being. He was happy. He became playful, and without moving his body drew the foolish apron from under the cushion.

"What's that for?"

"She must clear away the things. Stand up, please."

He tied the foolish apron round her waist, and she stood happily, eagerly acquiescent while he knotted the strings at her back.

"I suppose the charwoman washes up in the morning?"

"Oh no! I always leave everything straight and clean for her before I go to bed. I'm like that, Sam. I shall wash up after you've gone."

"Oh no, you won't, my lass."

"Why not?"

"Because you'll do it now."

"But why?"

"Because I feel as if I should like to see you washing up."

She entered into his mood. He helped her carry the things into the kitchen, and then stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the bedroom and almost beatifically contemplated the movements of her splendid limbs as she worked. This was life for him. It was the summit of life for him.

"I do wish this war was over," she said unexpectedly, in a dissatisfied, gloomy tone.

He understood then the origin of the melancholy which he had noticed in her on his arrival. She was worrying again about the war.

"Look here," he said teasingly. "Do you want me to strike you, you chit? You can't have the entire earth. The war will be over. It's going on better now. And if you've got any other idea than that in your head about the war, pull it out and throw it down the sink."

She smiled.

"Oh, Sam, you are funny sometimes! You almost make me laugh sometimes, you do. But you are silly."

"Not so silly as you think," said Sam.

Then he told her the enormous news of the peerage; he had not mentioned to her before the probability of a peerage, because he always preferred to make his effects with sudden brilliance. And naturally he had not told her earlier in the evening while she lay under suspicion. Of course she believed the news, but she could scarcely credit it all at once. She had to assimilate it gradually. She was amazed, delighted past measure. At first she could not speak.

"And you standing there watching me wash up!" she murmured at length, regarding him as a god. She sprang forward, rubbing her wet hands on the foolish apron, and dared to kiss the god. The god become mortal.

As he was leaving she stopped him at the outer door.

"I want to tell you something," she said gravely.

Sam was afraid, of he knew not what.

"Yes?"

"I love you. You're a terrible dear." She laughed with quiet glee.

But outside, on his way to meet Sid Jenkin, he kept on wondering what her earlier relations had been with the unnamed officer friend. He might have asked her, but as usual he had been too proud to ask. And why had he had to compel her to confess the visit to the Savoy? Why? Why? She was exquisite, but . . . Well, he had wanted to believe in her implicitly, and he had believed in her. He had fought on her side against himself.

On reflection he regretted his humorous remarks to her about the war. Though they had succeeded in their purpose, they were not in good taste, for they took no account of the daily torture of millions of young men, including Delphine's own promoted ranker. Of course it was the thought of that youth returning to the horrors of the front that very night that had induced her gloom. Was he, had he ever been, anything to her? . . . Still, she always had a general tendency to gloom: sometimes it came near to melancholia: a defect in her. So to-night's gloom might have been general and not particular.

He wished he had told her, what he had heard on authority at the Ministry, that no air-raid was expected to-night. He hated the idea of her all alone in the house during an air-raid. But she would have it so. She would put wet cotton wool in her ears and lie under the bedclothes and wait. Sometimes she would go off to sleep thus. There were certainly people with an instinct for solitude. He was aware of an extreme tenderness for her.

As Sid Jenkin and Sam rang at No. 10, Downing Street that evening, the door opened and a visitor was shown out.

"Hello, doc!" Sid greeted him. "I must have a word with you."

"You must come with me in my car, then. I haven't a moment," said the other briefly, after a slight hesitation, in a slightly nasal voice--a voice of authority which matched his mien and which evidently belonged to a man to whom ministers were not a bit more impressive than plain persons.

"Right, doc!" Sid agreed, in a surprisingly serious, acquiescent tone. And to Sam "Shan't be long."

The doctor eyed Sam for half a second in the dim light thrown from the interior of the house, and walked quickly to a waiting car, Sid following. Sam had to enter No. 10 alone; he was annoyed to find that he felt nervous thus suddenly deprived of Sid's high protection and sponsorship. The grave welcome of the butler's manner somewhat reassured him.

The butler suggested finding Miss Packer, and Sam followed him through the arcana of the house. Two minor members of the innumerable Government came down the stairs and Sam met them on the landing. The greetings showed reserve. Through an open door Sam glimpsed and heard the martial Tom Hogarth haranguing and hammering at two Staff Officers whose red-tabs were no protection against him. Tom paused for half a second as he caught sight of Sam, but gave no sign of recognition. The urbane Poppleham came down a passage playing the perfect Prime Minister's private secretary to two very self-assured and rather noisy ladies whom Sam did not know. The house seemed to be strident or murmurous with conspiracies.

Miss Packer was not in her room, but she appeared outside the door of the room in which Sam had originally breakfasted with the Prime Minister. She wore evening dress, and might almost have been called effulgent.

"I'll see," she said softly and mysteriously in her blanched voice, as she shook hands.

The next moment Sam was delivered into the breakfast-room, which that night Andrew Clyth was evidently using as a lair. Andy was lounging with bent head in an unassorted easy chair in front of the fire.

"How is the dear old lady? I thought I'd just look in to inquire," said Sam, with apparently intense sympathetic solicitude, as he advanced quickly towards the chair.

Andy moved and lifted his head as if out of a dream. He was wearing the velvet coat; his silver hair was in disorder, and he was both unkempt and unwashed.

"My dear fellow! My dear fellow!" said Andy emotionally, raising his hand to take Sam's. "This is most kind of you. I appreciate it more than anything. And I like you to be from Eccles. Such a relief from all those finicking Londoners. Doctor's just been. I hardly dare think she's over it, but the doctor says she is. At first, at the beginning of the attacks, they always warn me she cannot possibly get over it. But she always does. She's a marvellous woman. So quiet and gentle, you wouldn't think she had it in her to fight, but my God!--can't she fight!"

"I'm very glad," said Sam. "You know, Andy, I suppose I haven't set eyes on your mother for over thirty years, and yet I can see her as clear as anything. I always thought a great deal of her."

"And she hasn't changed!" Andy exclaimed with animation. "She hasn't changed! That's the astonishing thing. Sit down, lad. Draw that chair up."

Sam pulled a chair from the table and sat close to Andy. It was not a comfortable chair for gossip, but Sam was quite happy in it. There they were together, two boys, alone together in the half-lit room, with the image of an ageless old woman in their minds, a woman without ambition for herself and surveying the world kindly, lovingly, forgivingly, optimistically, from the threshold of death. All her character came back to Sam's memory. He felt himself to be spiritually very near to Andy. He positively liked Andy, had no rancour against him, and would have done anything for him. Old Mrs. Clyth was in the room, a presence unseen.

Andy gave some particulars of the illness, and then, leaning closer towards Sam, he said: "I'll tell you something, Sammy. You know--you know when I was casting round for someone for Records, it was she who put you into my head. 'Why don't you get Sam Raingo?' she said to me. She always had a soft corner for you, lad."

"Did she, by Jove!"

"She did. It was like a stroke of lightning for me. And she gave her reasons too. How you were--well, this, that, and the other--I won't tell you what she did say. I decided instantly. I saw she was right. As far as that goes she's never wrong. She's uncanny. And ever since I see better and better how right she was."

They sat silent, religiously contemplating the venerated image within them. In that moment Sam could understand the worship of God. Here, then, was the explanation of his call to office. No chicane in it, no deep scheming! It was a mystical explanation. Never would he have divined it for himself. His appointment sprang from a favourable impression which, unknowingly, he had made when he was a youth, in the brain of an old lady who judged the fundamentals of character by infallible instinct. He was awed. He was ashamed of his sins. All the impurities of ambition, greed, vindictiveness, egotism, slipped away. The desire to do the very best he could in his office flamed and burned within him. He laughed at his weak heart; his weak heart should be his servant. His years dropped from him; he had the pure ardour of a boy. He could see nothing but the good side of Andy. Was not Andy the son of his mother? Was not Andy engaged in the most terrific task that ever burdened a man, and should he not give his very soul to the helping of Andy?

Yes, and should he not cherish Delphine with a tenderness far surpassing any compassion that had ever inspired him? He would make his relations with Delphine such that old Mrs. Clyth herself might bless them! "And I'm fifty-five and a fat lump of a man," he thought, puzzled.

"I needn't ask you if you're getting on all right, because I know you are," said Andy, passing his hand over his hair, and smiling.

"Shall I tell you what worries me?" Sam answered. "And I didn't think it would."

"What?"

"The responsibility of the thing," said Sam. He was going to say "the damned thing," but the image of old Mrs. Clyth chastened his tongue.

"Pooh! That's nothing. You'll soon forget that."

"Well, I don't know. I feel as if I shouldn't sleep very well to-night, any how."

"But do you like it? Do you enjoy it?"

"I suppose I do," Sam admitted, rather sheepishly.

"Of course you do. You were made for office. As for the responsibility, the work is work like any other work. It isn't a nuisance if you take pleasure in it. Can't be. And all this talk you hear about being only too willing to 'put down the burden of office' is insincere nonsense. It makes me sick. Look at me. Look at my responsibility. I'm game for it. I love it. World-war and so on--it's wine to me, it's women and song to me, lad. There are no public worries. There are only private worries. If my mother's ill, the world-war can go hang, and I don't want to help it. It was only because I had a feeling mother was going to have one of her attacks that I didn't quite come off yesterday afternoon. I didn't, did I?"

"I think you came off very well," Sam said dishonestly, and at the same time he thought momentarily of Delphine.

"You did!" Andy clutched at the reassurance. "I'm glad. Very glad."

"Considering," Sam added.

"Considering what?"

"Well, the material you had to handle. Especially conscription for Ireland."

"Oh, we shall have to drop that. I knew before I had sat down."

"But nothing you said was received as well as conscription for Ireland. By far the loudest cheers."

"Yes, but whose cheers? What sort of cheers? I know that sort of cheering. I say, Sam," Andy's always changing tone was modulated into quite a nice key of seriousness. "Been reading that fellow what's-his-name's attacks in The Sunday Times?"

"Who? Oh, him! Yes."

"Pretty damaging, eh?"

"You leave him to me," said Sam without any hesitation, full of loyalty.

"Oh! You think you can. But they're fairly stiff, aren't they?"

"You leave him to me. He's in my department," Sam insisted, though he had no idea how he could effectively deal with the foremost military writer in Europe. He shook his head defiantly, challengingly. Andy smiled appreciatively, as at a good boy.

"I didn't say anything to you about salary, Sam."

"No, sir, and you'd better not, if you'll allow me to say so." He became inexplicably respectful, formal, in his repudiation of the notion of taking a salary.

"But there are others, for instance me, who can't quite afford not to be paid for their services."

"Then let them be paid, sir. I've no objection. But you'll never persuade me to accept a penny." There was a faint note of rancour in his voice.

"Enough said! Enough said." Andy yielded, pretending humorously to have been bullied.

The door opened slowly and quietly, and Miss Packer entered, bearing a basin. There was something splendid and yet sinister in the spectacle of this elegant, majestic Juno playing the handmaid.

"She's asleep," murmured Miss Packer.

"Thank God!" Andy ejaculated with fervour, as it might have been at the news that all the German armies were driven into the Rhine.

"What's that you've got there?"

"Some broth, sir." She smiled aside at Sam, and then tenderly at the Prime Minister.

"I didn't order it. I don't want any broth."

"Please, sir," she pleaded. A hint of commanding and assured determination in her tone contradicted the "sir." Andy took the basin and smiled aside at Sam, rather foolishly. An odd domestic scene. Yes, it was clear that Miss Packer ruled the empire.

"I say." Andy stopped her as she was going out. "You might tell Mr. Poppleham that I want him to see our friend here to-night."

"Certainly, sir."

"I say," said Andy, like a spoiled child, after noisily absorbing a mouthful of broth direct from the basin. "Just taste, this, will you, and tell me if it really isn't bilge-water. I haven't used the spoon."

Miss Packer had gone. Sam took the basin on its saucer, thinking: "Prime Ministers are entitled to these caprices of behaviour, no doubt."

"Seems to me splendid broth. Scotch, of course." Sam licked his lips.

"Funny!" Andy murmured meditatively. "Whenever my dear mother's ill my sense of taste leaves me. Some obscure kind of nervous reaction, I suppose." He spoke as if secretly proud of such a reaction.

"Dashed if I don't have another sip!" said Sam half roguishly.

At that moment, as he was taking a second mouthful, the door opened and Tom Hogarth was seen looming in the shadow of the doorway. Sam turned.

"Here!" Andy exclaimed. "You needn't have all my broth, and you're going to upset the blooming basin if you don't take care."

Sam caught Tom Hogarth's blazing eye for a second. The man was thunderstruck.

"Come in, come in!" said Andy impatiently to Hogarth, rescuing his food.

Tom Hogarth obeyed, leaving the door ajar. Sam saw in a flash that Tom Hogarth was astonished and aghast at the degree of intimacy which existed between him and the Prime Minister. He, Sam, had been seen drinking the Prime Minister's broth. Sam felt triumphant. He comprehended that political power sprang as much from intimacy as from anything. The minister who was on a footing to share the Prime Minister's broth was on a footing to influence the Prime Minister with peculiar, perhaps unsurpassed, force. He had known the truth of the abstract principle, which was no more Oriental than Occidental. He now witnessed the concrete illustration of it in the new glance of Hogarth's eyes partly curious and partly respectful. And the situation had arisen solely out of the way in which Sam had first entered the room and greeted Andy, winning his sympathy at a stroke. Hogarth was evidently sizing Sam up entirely afresh.

Sam was delighted, but he was also alarmed--at the implied revelation of his own naïveté in the political game. He had sat for years in the House of Commons, but rather as a solitary. He had been nominated to an occasional committee; he had attended Speaker's dinners, party dinners; he had listened to the harangues of whips, and of single-taxers and other monomaniacs, but of the inside of politics he had no practical experience--save in regard to the electioneering of his own party in the Midlands and the North and a little in East Anglia. This he did know, with some intimacy and understanding. Now, however, he had disturbing perceptions of factors of all sorts to whose existence he had scarcely given a thought. Similarly with the war! What did he know of the realities which underlay the appearances of the war? Nothing but what his common sense and his genuine knowledge of human nature could hint to him. And yet, without any initiation at all, he had been put in charge of an immense and delicate organism whose exploitation specially demanded the knowledge which he did not possess and which he must pick up discreetly, gingerly, bit by bit. He was fearful. He saw vague perils and menaces everywhere around him.

"Here's Tarporley," said Hogarth in a low voice, almost apologetically to this chief.

"Tarporley? Tarporley? Who's Tarporley?" the Prime Minister asked sharply, though he knew well who Tarporley was.

"You know--"

"Oh, one of the Military Intelligence fellows."

"The one. The newest broom." Hogarth shrugged his shoulders, placatorily, and laughed.

"What's he want?"

"Oh, nothing. He telephoned me he'd like to see me, and I told him to come here, and I'm through with him. He said if he might just meet you. . . . I'll tell him he can't, eh?"

Hogarth knew his chief. There were moments when Andy could not bear not to be all things to all men. And especially he had an eye for careerists.

"Oh, well, if he's here--"

In ten seconds Hogarth came back with Major-General Tarporley. Sam noticed that Andy had slipped again into his unconscious trick of glancing sideways, or under dropped eyelids, to see what effect he was producing.

Four people were now in the room, and each of them was an audience, for Andy was always an audience to himself. He rose slowly and languidly, in the manner of a poet, exaggerating strongly the contrast between his own demeanour and that of the very smart, full-bodied military gentleman, all khaki, red, brass, steel, leather, and ribbons. He deliberately roughened his hair.

The general, cap under arm, bowed and clicked, and in a thin voice said something about "the honour" with excessive deference. He was in a state of super-plenary sartorial correctness. His thin chin was blue-black and as smooth, and glistening as ivory. Apparently he must shave, or be shaved, about every two hours. He looked as if he was all ready to descend into the lists for a mortal joust, which he would take airily, as a cup of tea. Sam thought of the hard, continuous labours of the batman whose patriotic role in the great war was to maintain General Tarporley in immaculate personal splendour.

Andy paid the general a poetic compliment and then said that he meant to pick the general's brains at the earliest opportunity. All was vague, non-committal.

"Do you know Samuel Raingo, the new Minister, shortly to be Lord--what did you say you were going to call yourself, Sam?"

"Raingo?" said Sam.

The two men bowed, measuring each other.

"You may be of use to one another," the Prime Minister added.

"Why?" thought Sam--and he would have thought earlier had he known his job, "it may be this chap--if not, one of his friends--who's made that order forbidding his people to enter my Ministry." He had a wild impulse to tackle the general on the spot about the order, but caution held him back. He would mention it to Andy afterwards. No, he would not mention it to Andy. He would deal with it himself when the chance came. He was convinced that not even the newest star of the War Office Secret Service could beat him in chicane. He assumed an air of modest and naive innocence, and smilingly said something artless. Tom Hogarth was marching up and down the room. What Sam respected in the oiled military dandy was the imperfectly concealed background of his excessive deference to the Prime Minister--a background of hard, uncompromising reserve, which Andy tried in vain to dissipate.

"Well, sir, what's your summing up of the M.I. merchant?" asked Tom Hogarth, twinkling, as soon as the general had taken leave.

"Tom!" said the Prime Minister, as if pulling up to the surface and exposing a subject which had been disturbingly sprouting in the depths of his mind. "Here's Sam says he won't accept any salary." He drank the broth in quick gulps.

"What do you mean, sir, won't accept any salary?"

"I prefer not to," said Sam sharply.

"Too high-minded, I suppose," answered Hogarth. And to the Prime Minister: "Of course he needn't keep it, sir. You won't object to him doing what he likes with it after he's got it; he could give it to the Home for Lost Dogs or the Hospital for Orphan Kittens, but I assume you'll insist on his taking the salary attached to his post?"

"Why should I, if I prefer to save the country the expense?" Sam demanded, and his own words seemed to ring false to him.

"The country be damned!" said Tom Hogarth, chuckling; and putting his thumbs into the armholes of his waistcoat. "It would be in the papers before you could say knife that Lord Raingo had nobly refused to take a penny of the poor distressed country's money--whereas the rest of His Majesty's Ministry were raking in the shekels in the usual manner. Inference obvious. You know you're only making a noise like a millionaire, my dear baron. It's easy for you--you're getting richer every year because you can't spend. But what about us? I'm a man that has to live on the country--I've nothing else to live on. I work sixteen hours a day seven days a week. My sole distraction is presiding at uneatable banquets given to or by profiteers and other common objects of the Whitehall gutter. I have to stand up every day of my life to be shot at. At the end I may just contrive not to be hung, but I'm certain to be thrown out of office--we all are--and I shall have to fight an election and no doubt lose it on what I haven't saved out of my salary, and I've two boys at Winchester and a girl at Roedean, and debts in every corner of the parishes of St. James's and St. George's, Hanover Square; and I'm to be made to look like a money-grubber because you're so stinking with riches you have to hold your own nose. I wish to God this war had bloomed in the eighteenth century. If I'd had my present job when Charlie Fox first entered Parliament, I should be making a million a year out of it. There's a lot to be said for the Augustan age. You can't give forth this noisy noise of yours, Sam. You aren't going to be allowed to. Of course, sir," he turned to Andy, "I'm speaking for myself alone, I needn't say. Naturally the decision rests with you."

Tom was quite good humoured, but with grimness and even with ferocity. The force of the man beamed out of him. He approached Sam and stood quite close to him. Sam laughed. Andy laughed.

"And I'm nearly in the same boat--not quite," said Andy.

"I hadn't looked at it like that," said Sam.

"Then why the devil hadn't you?" Tom Hogarth demanded, rather less pleasantly.

"You needn't take the money, Sam, but you'd better sign for it, and it can go into the pool."

"And my miserable share of it will pay for Roedean," said Tom Hogarth, smacking his lips. "Ha, ha! I spend five millions a day sometimes, and at night my wife asks me for a fiver and I scrape it together in ten-shilling notes and some silver. Keep the home-fires burning." He marched away to a corner of the room in triumph.

"All right," said Sam. "As you please, sir."

He had a base feeling of throwing pence to ragamuffins. He knew that he was envied; he liked to be envied; and he hated to like to be envied. The image of old Mrs. Clyth was somehow fading. He grasped after it, but it eluded him.

The wearied, worried, resigned, sedate Mr. Poppleham came in. He wore a dinner-jacket. Tom Hogarth was in a shabby tweed suit, and Sam himself had not troubled to change--at Sid Jenkin's suggestion. But Poppleham, who never knew what ceremonial he might have to take part in of a night, must follow the rules, even if doing so shortened his dinner-hour. Poppleham had no surcease, and while possibly Hogarth worked sixteen hours a day, Poppleham worked eighteen. There was little mercy for Poppleham. He bore in his bony white hand the galley-proofs of some printed matter.

"Perhaps you might like to glance at this, sir. It's just come in."

The Prime Minister took the slip with interest. And Tom Hogarth, interested immediately at the sight of newspaper stuff, peered without any shame over the Prime Minister's shoulder.

Sam, who was close by them, could scarcely avoid reading the title: "French Press Criticism of Britain." His heart made itself felt instantly. The slip was a proof of the article which he had caused to be put together that day at his Ministry. He was alarmed. By what underground agency had it reached the Prime Minister? He saw himself in a net of spying whose existence he had not even suspected. Was there a traitor in his Ministry? Obviously there was a traitor in the office of the newspaper, which was understood to be uncompromisingly hostile to the Government and which had just been openly defying the Government and risking suppression. Yes, his eyes were being opened to the realities of politics in war, and he was alarmed. The article was sensational; he knew it. The article might have repercussions throughout the world.

Curiously the Prime Minister's interest in it was not maintained; he read some of it with care, but the latter part of it he did not read at all.

"Um!" he murmured with a faint smile which might or might not have been expressing amusement.

The fact was, as Sam divined, that Andy was preoccupied with his mother; in this lay the explanation of his attitude of indifference towards the salary question. Tom Hogarth, on the other hand, read with the maximum of intensity though with extreme, almost incredible, rapidity. The whole of his tireless, greedy, tremendous brain was operating on that slip of paper.

"What newspaper, Poppy?" Tom demanded.

Poppleham raised his eyelids and was about to reply when Sam snapped out the answer. The tired eyelids relapsed on the tired eyes.

"You know about it then?" said Andy.

"Considering that I did it," said Sam laconically.

He made no reference to the machinery, or the machination, responsible for the arrival of the proof in Downing Street; nor did anyone else. The prudent policy of letting a sleeping dog lie evidently appealed to all of them.

Tom Hogarth looked straight at Sam with blazing eye and was about to speak but checked himself, no doubt feeling that he must tread carefully with a man who shared the Prime Minister's broth. Firedamp was in the air Poppleham alone was concerned.

"Well, what do you think of it?" Sam asked nobody in particular, soothingly.

The Prime Minister said naught. For the moment Sam was the Prime Minister's pet lamb, the protégé for whom he was responsible to his colleagues; and if he could not defend, at least he would not criticise.

"It's madness!" Tom Hogarth fiercely ejaculated.

"Why is it madness?" Sam demanded, still gently.

"It's asking for trouble--obviously."

"There won't be any trouble," said Sam. "America will be delighted, and some other places too. France can't say anything. And I'll lay you what you like you'll see a difference in the tone of the Paris press from now on. I've thought the thing out pretty carefully--needless to say."

"And in that paper!" Tom Hogarth exclaimed passionately.

"Who does this fellow take me for?" thought Sam, content. "Does he imagine I've stepped out of the nursery into the Ministry?"

He recalled some of his more brilliant feats in the manipulation of public opinion regarding certain limited companies.

He had yielded once that evening. He would not yield again.

He was in a mood not to care a fig for Tom Hogarth, or for Andy either.

"My dear fellow," he said aloud to Tom, "surely you can see that I chose that paper deliberately. It's notoriously against the Government. Hence Paris can't suspect that the Government's had a hand in it." He turned to Andy. "Isn't that plain? Further, if I may say so, incidentally I've nobbled the paper. I fancy I've got the blessed paper in my pocket now--anyhow for a few weeks. Not without difficulty."

Miss Packer appeared, and everybody looked at her. Andy jumped up as out of a lethargy.

"She's awake now. She'd like to see you--just for a second. The nurse thinks you oughtn't to stay."

Andy flew, Miss Packer holding the door open for him. No doubt in one corner of his mind he was weakly glad to escape from a tiresome dissension. Both Sam and Tom Hogarth forgot him.

"Here one day we've practically decided to suppress the paper, and the next we're asking it to help us!"

"And what of it? It is helping us." Sam saw that Hogarth could not possibly maintain the position into which he had blundered.

"It ought to be stopped! It ought to be stopped! It's bound to confuse our relations, and it ought to be stopped!"

"Well, you're entitled to your opinion, my dear chap. But the thing's in my department, and I'll take the responsibility of not stopping it."

"That's all very well--all very well. The responsibility is collective. That's what we all have to understand. Collective."

Tom strode out of the room. Sam stood hesitant.

"The Prime Minister wished me to speak to you about the procedure as to your peerage, sir," Poppleham began, in his flat, half-saintly voice.

"Yes. But I've had no sort of official notice of it," said Sam with a short laugh. "From anybody! I was expecting--"

"No, sir. You won't get any notice at this stage. It will be in the papers to-morrow morning, and that will be the first intimation."

Mr. Poppleham then entered upon what seemed to Sam to be a long rigmarole in which the Privy Council and the Heralds' College played incomprehensible parts.

"Yes, yes. Quite." Sam agreed at intervals.

"Lord Raingo of--er--where, sir?"

"Eccles in the county of Lancaster."

Mr. Poppleham wrote.

"Did the Prime Minister happen to mention the question of photographs, sir?"

Up to this point the conversation had not laid hold of Sam, absorbed as he had been in the clash with Hogarth. But he was now startled into full attention.

"No. Not a word."

"The Prime Minister thinks it advisable for you to have some new photographs taken. Several. There will be a demand for them, of course."

"There has been. But I couldn't supply it. I haven't any--except a few old ones," said Sam, who hated photographers and had not submitted to them for many years.

"Old ones would scarcely do in any case. The Prime Minister thinks it important that you should not look too young. I said 'several,' because the big dailies, and even some of the weeklies, prefer to use exclusives. Perhaps you might be able to send for more than one photographer." Mr. Poppleham went on quietly. "And there's your necktie, sir, if you'll pardon such a detail. Your necktie is of course well known. But blue in a photograph is apt to come out white, and so the white spots would not show properly."

"My God!" said Sam, cheerfully mocking. "Here is a complication that hadn't occurred to me!"

"So that if you could wear black-and-white instead of blue-and-white, of course only for the photographing, it might be a good thing. But the same shape at the ends, sir. If you could get one to-morrow."

"But, Mr. Poppleham, do you know where these neckties come from? Eccles."

"Where, sir? Oh, yes, Eccles."

"Had 'em from there---same shop--for something like thirty years, my friend. However, I'll see what can be done. I'll see."

"It was thought there ought to be no doubt about your special neckties in the first photographs, sir. You see, it will give something to the caricaturists to fasten on to."

Sam left the room solemnized by the gravity of the issues which Mr. Poppleham had just put before him and which in his simplicity he had not even dreamed of. The complexity of politics struck him afresh, and Andy's all-embracing watchfulness forced his-admiration. "All St. Stephen's is a stage," he reflected.

As he went downstairs--Mr. Poppleham had suggested that it was needless to await the Prime Minister's return--he saw that the door of the room where Hogarth had been talking to the officers was still open. He stopped and, beheld the figures of Hogarth and Sid Jenkin standing close together, each holding a glass.

"Oh, you've come back, Sid."

"I say, old man, one minute. Half a mo', Tom," cried Sid, rushing to Sam in the corridor. "I've had that message I was expecting. It's not quite so certain as I hoped for, but it's practically certain--he's got clear away. I shall know more in a day or two."

"Geoffrey?"

"Yes. I was just coming up to tell you," Sid finished proudly.

"The king has been pleased to confer the dignity of a Barony of the United Kingdom upon Mr. Samuel Raingo, Minister of Records." This announcement, under various head-lines in all newspapers, definitely marked a stage in Sam's life. Everybody now addressed him as "my lord," except those sufficiently high up in the world to say "Lord Raingo," and those few who (with self-complacency) felt that they could still say "Raingo," and those still fewer who went on saying "Sam" as though nothing had happened. The demeanour of the staff at Berkeley Mansion showed that the Mansion was naïvely delighted and proud. And it was the same at the Ministry, where the most pleased, excited, and fussily deferential of all was Sir Ernest Timmerson himself.

"Well, my lord," Delphine greeted him, tenderly roguish, when he called to pay her a hurried visit.

"Well, my lord," were his wife's first words, when, without warning, she entered the flat in the early evening of that day. (The coincidence disturbed him.)

After seeing Sid Jenkin at No. 10 he had gone himself straight to the always-open telegraph office at Charing Cross and telegraphed the news about Geoffrey to Adela at Moze, and she had received the message at eight-thirty a.m. He saw at once, as she coldly kissed him, that with all her mysterious aloofness, outwardly so tranquil and indifferent, she was in an acute state of nerves. She seemed to be living withdrawn in communion with Geoffrey, living on Geoffrey. Sam was touched at the sight of her. There she was, ageing, desiccated, dignified, destined perhaps never again to arouse passion in any man (but you never knew)-- and yet inwardly burning in a flame of maternity. Sam too was elated and kindled by the thought of Geoffrey free, but his excitement could not match hers. She worried him with questions which he could not answer, for Sid Jenkin had suddenly gone to the Continent, without warning and without trace. (Sam was gradually putting Sid into the class of half-unreliable dash-abouts, as Sid's individuality took more definite shape in his mind.)

At the same time Adela worried, even exasperated Sam with trifling points concerning the title. She spoke at length of new notepaper, of the coat-of-arms, of the necessity of instructing country servants in the right forms of approach to members of the peerage and their wives. She reminded herself and him that Geoffrey would be "the Honourable." All these matters, which for the most part she had mentioned before, on the first tidings of a peerage, struck Sam as petty in the circumstances. Was the peerage anything but a device to help Sam to help his country to the fullest possible extent? He sought to restore her perspective, for she was by no means a fool, as he kept on saying to himself, despite her wandering, darting mind. He spoke vaguely of vast plans for the improvement of the Ministry as an organization. She immediately said that she could see in his face that he was overworking. He soothed her with fibs. He was utterly determined to work hard. He was convinced that he could do so without detriment to his health, and he was mad for work.

His plans were indeed vast. Sometimes he wondered what was the quality that set him above even the best members of the staff, who knew so much more about the technique of propaganda than he did himself. He soon perceived that his superiority lay in a higher degree of creative enterprise and of the courage to execute. The staff was timorous. The article on French Press criticism, which had caused Timmerson and others to tremble, had precisely the success which Sam had predicted for it. But this success did not cure the cowardice within the Ministry. When he sketched to Timmerson, Mayden, and his secretaries and the financial director, a scheme for bringing the outlying departments together under the main roof--the book-department, the foreign-press reading department, and the British and foreign press reception department--Timmerson led the revolt of prudence and discretion. Mayden alone, in his airy, imperturbable, sympathetic way, was ready for anything. Sam said that there was plenty of space in the hotel for all, and that rooms must be shared and clerks crowded together. Timmerson feared dissatisfaction in the staff. Sam damned the staff--and suggested commandeering a larger hotel. Timmerson then feared the press and the Treasury. Sam damned the press and the Treasury.

The climax came with Sam's hint that he meant to try to get hold of all Government propaganda whatsoever--that of the Admiralty, the War Office, the National Service, the Munitions--even Mayden was a bit flustered then, and at this sign Sam laughed off the hint as a dream. But it was more than a dream; obviously all propaganda ought to be, and must be, under one sole direction. Such a logical arrangement would do away with overlapping, amateurishness, positive contradictions, dangerous discrepancies, avoidable expense, delays through lack of the co-ordination of material, and the fantastic consequences of inter-departmental jealousy. And chiefly it would centralise power in the hands of the person best fitted to wield power, Sam himself. It was the very crown of his living vision of perfection in propaganda, and his heart did not relinquish it. Indeed the next day he began privately to take the first steps towards realizing it.

In the meantime he devoted much effort to the elaboration of daily and hourly hospitality of every kind to the British press and the correspondents of the Allied and neutral press. He filched another floor in the building up the street where this hospitality, mental and material, was practised. He talked to the pressmen once and occasionally twice a day in English and in French. He invited very small parties of them to lunch at the Savoy--he knew that he could not handle large parties. He engaged a suite for himself at the hotel, and the chosen were invited there. He abrogated the rule against giving out advertisements of War Loan to newspapers which, while not disaffected, were inclined to behave uncomfortably. He had the knack of winning over journalists; he had always had it--was born with it. His sole enemy was an excessively tall, excessively thin, bearded foreign-affairs expert, who would listen to his somewhat ragged discourses with a calm, condescending mien, as one who said "I know more than this tyro, with all his special sources of information." The down-flowing white beard made him feel nervous, and a lunch-party at which the beard assisted was a sad failure. "Well," said Sam doggedly to himself. "He does know more, curse him!" He would have assassinated the fellow, had assassination been within the rules of the game.

Sam's propagandist care for journalists was not to be confined to Britishers and the resident correspondents of the Continental and American press. His predecessor had initiated a project for bringing to London a few of the leading editors of the Dominions and the United States, which project seemed to Sam to be half-hearted and meanly conceived. He transformed it, multiplied it by ten, and lifted it up to a plane of splendour and costliness unprecedented in the annals of the art of capturing the organs of public opinion--an art of which, he remembered himself, in earlier days he had had some very satisfactory experience. The English-speaking press of the entire world was to be entertained in the grand manner. Money was not to be spared; it was to be squandered. Mayden had charge of the hotel arrangements, and Mayden was told by Sam himself, and in a tone full of significance, that economy would be counted against him as a sin. Mayden replied that he understood, and soon began to prove that he had understood. The enlargement of the original scheme had to be carried out by cabling: which added to the general zest. The whole Ministry grew excited about the visit of the Dominions and American press; and Sam at least as much as any of his staff. Word was passed that the Minister was excited, and so excitement reacted on excitement.

And yet all the time, Sam, who had been despising his wife and the heads of his staff for their infantile interest in the details of his formal elevation to the peerage, found in the mysteries of his soul that just those details obsessed him far more than any ministerial work--even the organizing of the tremendous press-visit. Somehow his supreme mental preoccupation was the ceremonial preliminary to the peerage. Beneath an ironic demeanour he took with an extraordinary worried seriousness such details as sitting for his photograph and the proper attire therefore. If he watched over cables to New York, Chicago, Milwaukee (especially Milwaukee), he also watched over telegrams to Eccles about neckties. The Heralds' College became for him the most important and formidable institution in the kingdom; the Heralds' College made him nervous. In the end he rivalled and surpassed Adela in his minute concern over note-paper, envelopes, crests, coat-of-arms. He almost trembled with apprehension when he learnt that the formal supplication had been sent to the Lord Chancellor to receive him, and when the Lord Chancellor grandiosely replied that the suppliant would be received on a certain date, he still trembled.

The summit of the high ordeal loomed now close above him, and he was more nervous than a student about to sit for an examination. In vain he repeated to himself that he was being merely childish. Elevation to the peerage, the honour of it, the publicity of it, the majesty of it, was a terrific event, and he was capable of neglecting nothing connected with it. He, Sam, of Eccles, was to be a peer.

He made mistakes--and two serious ones. Both were inexcusable. He had to have two sponsors to introduce him into the House of Lords. Lord Ockleford was the Leader of the House and a friendly and urbane colleague, and Sam thought that he would like to be sponsored by Lord Ockleford, and without consulting experts he wrote to his lordship to ask for his collaboration. The earl's reply was a masterpiece. "Greatly as I should esteem the privilege which you offer to me," wrote the earl, and went on to point out that a peer must be introduced by his equals in rank, and that as Sam was to be a baron, whereas an earl was an earl. . . . Sam's humiliation was intense; he blushed in solitude as he read the courtly letter. He had been caught in a frightful solecism. There was absolutely no escape from the quandary. He had demonstrated publicly--for Lord Ockleford could not be expected to keep the titbit to himself--that he belonged to the type of the new rich. "What the devil does it matter?" he cried superiorly; but it mattered.

The second serious mistake was in regard to his peer's robe. He ordered it to be sent to Berkeley Street instead of to the suite in the hotel. His wife happened to be in the flat when it arrived. She had already smiled at his decision to buy a robe (at a cost of nearly £200) in preference to hiring one for about fourpence. And when he had said stiffly that he would enter the House of Lords in no hired reach-me-down she had smiled again. Indeed her behaviour was incomprehensible and annoying. But as she asked his permission to take the gorgeous garment of scarlet and ermine out of the shell in which it had arrived she appeared to be commendably serious. She shook away its creases, admired it, and gravely asked him to put it on. He put it on. She then gravely asked him to walk to and fro in it. There was no reason for Sam refusing to do so, though he felt somewhat self-conscious. He obediently walked to and fro in the trailing thing. And Adela suddenly burst into laughter, loud and hysterical. Sam was extremely and foolishly cross.

The day came when Samuel Raingo, the Eccles boy and millionaire, preceded by two of the very highest officials in the historic hierarchy of Parliamentary ceremonialism, walked slowly in the red-benched chamber, towards a Lord Chancellor seated on an unrecognizable woolsack. Sam was flanked by two barons--not barons descended from the defiers of King John at Runnymede, but common barons of no lineal prestige, mere acquaintances who not much earlier had been as plebeian as Sam himself and whose elevation had been due to causes perhaps far less avowable than Sam's. All were gorgeously and absurdly clad. Sam felt at once an ass, a cynic, and a conqueror.

"This is nothing but a form, and will be over in five minutes," he said to himself; but he was horribly nervous--and yet naïvely proud. He was aware of a few peers sitting on either side of his procession, leaning back, sprawling their legs, yawning, digging hands into pockets, murmuring politely to one another tepid observations ("the latest cut-throat" was a phrase he thought of as being applied by them to himself), and as bored as Russian boyars watching the manoeuvres of a troupe of gipsy dancing-girls. The procession halted at a word from another official, less exalted but more domineering than the others. Sam was now rather worried by the insubordinate antics of his robe, and he had almost completely forgotten the lesson of the rehearsal which only a few minutes before had taken place in an ante-room. Instead of collecting his wits like a man, he was criticizing the architecture of the chamber and comparing it with that of the House of Commons, or studying the hairs at the base of the Lord Chancellor's nose. But the angels had charge over him.

"Bow," said the sergeant-majorish official behind him, in a no-nonsense voice loud enough (Sam thought) to be heard across the chamber. Sam bowed. "Sit down," said the unashamed voice, and it was as if he had said: "Sit down, damn you!" Sam sat down. "Stand up," said the voice. Sam stood up. "Bow," said the voice. And so on until Sam had bowed, sat down, and stood up thrice. He felt like a recruit, a conscript, in the grandeur of the dim chamber.

"And this, too, is part of the war," he thought, with a sort of insane detachment. His uneasy mind ranged over the immeasurable panorama of the war; the ministerial departments contending with one another in secret, the altercations in the Commons, the clangour of the factories, the bland disdain of imprisoned conscientious objectors, the private agonies of the parents of young conscripts, Mrs. Blacklow waxing with a baby not her husband's, his wife toying with the idea of being presented at court, Delphine dreaming in loneliness of love, submarines under the sea and ships on the sea being blown up, all the blood and mud and roar and shrieking of the battlefields, and beyond the battle-fields the veiled land where the enemy planned more destruction or yearned for peace at any price, and his son Geoffrey, who had had the guts to escape from those lands and was now--somewhere.

"And here am I performing in a red dressing-gown that cost me a hundred and eighty pounds!" thought Sam. But not quite so crudely as it might seem, for he well realized, beneath his nervous cynicism, that the most preposterous contrasts are capable of rational explanation, and that it takes every kind of phenomenon to make a world. He saw through the back of his head the picture of Pitt dying in his robes in another House of Lords. He was impressed, intimidated, confident, scornful, and resolved. Of the taking of the oath he had no recollection afterwards. When the Lord Chancellor, a lawyer who had quarrelled violently with him years ago about the conduct of an immense financial action--when the Lord Chancellor benignly shook hands with him, tears came into his eyes. He could not have uttered another word. Strange! Strange!

"I bet Adela's here," he thought suddenly, though she had said naught about attending the ceremony. "I wonder what she'll say."

In the ante-room again he threw off his robe, shook hands with and thanked various persons, and returned to his right mind. The next minute he went swiftly, as it were defiantly, back into the chamber, a completely initiated baron, a baron entitled to stand sponsor for later barons, and sat down on the front Government benches, the ambition of a lifetime accomplished--more than the ambition of a lifetime. Lord Ockleford took his hand in the friendliest welcoming manner. Of course he was still very self-conscious. And having come through one ordeal he began to fear the next and greater ordeal, a speech in that house, in the presence of those boyars.

Sam had not yet kissed hands as Minister, nor, of course, had he been inducted into the Privy Council. He arrived at the Palace early on a Tuesday morning, in his Ministry car driven by a girl who pleased him because she used her horn far less than any other chauffeur he had ever known. The girl drove past guardian policemen into the precincts with that curious pride that the whole of the Ministry staff seemed to feel in Sam's elevation. Servants led him to an ante-room peopled by two other candidates for the degree of Right Honourable (a certain wholesale quality about this Privy Council, thought Sam), and by four ageing officials, calm and yet fussy, dignified yet comic, who were all evidently animated by a sincere, passionate, transcendent belief in the vital importance of ritual in politics. Two of the officials minutely instructed him in the role which he was about to play, and as they talked, in low tones, with occasional weary smiles, like a clergyman to a bridegroom and bride in a vestry, he noticed the groovy lines of ritual in their faces, and in their eyes the vain meanness of obsequious habit. They left the room, the tremendous lesson ended, and Sam talked to the other destined Right Honourables, whose nervousness had the effect of curing him of his own. Moreover, he observed that he had the best new frock-coat in the room.

Then at length he was ushered into the audience chamber, a small, dark apartment which vividly reminded him of the office of an unsuccessful company promoter in New York; ornate decoration, a bright carpet of vexatious pattern, a desk which was not used, chairs which were not used, walls without significance. He knelt before the fountain of honour, a hand was placed on his extended wrist. He raised it and kissed it. He took the oath, of which little was clear to him except that he swore to hear no evil spoken of the King. He rose, with an aching knee, and backed away and was led out of the room--but only to be led in again and hear a deep voice referring to details of his own career and expressing vague hopes for his success in office and recalling the seriousness of the times.

He was now, by virtue of these brief, smooth, fantastic ceremonies, not merely a peer but a Minister. But no seals were delivered to him, for though a minister, he was not of that higher order of being, a minister of state. He could not sit in the Cabinet; he could only be summoned to give counsel to and take orders from the Cabinet. It was small solace to him, indeed rather an insult, to be told that he would be a member of the Imperial Cabinet, a body created for the comforting of Colonial politicians, which discussed tremendous questions of no direct importance, and did nothing. Sam hated and mistrusted the word empire and its adjective, for he had always heard it in the mouths of self-seekers and vapid rhetoricians. The sole material proofs of his dizzying rise were a tawdry red box containing his patent of nobility and receipts for substantial sums paid to the Clerk of the Privy Council and the Garter King-at-Arms. There is no rose without a thorn, and no triumph without a hurting disappointment.

He descended the steps of the august portico into the beautiful morning of the real world and waved to his waiting car.

"Please, sir," said a woman's thin voice at his side. For a tenth of a second he did not recognize the poor, ineffectual figure of Mrs. Blacklow, the temporary clerk in his City office and the detested of Swetnam. She proffered an open telegram in her shabby-gloved hand. He knew that something grave had happened, and probably at Moze. Only from Moze, and by somebody unfamiliar with his new habits, would a telegram have been addressed to his City office.

"Get in, Mrs. Blacklow," he said, and to the driver: "The Ministry."

Then he read the telegram: "Serious accident to Lady Raingo. Your presence necessary. Wrenkin." He noticed the time of dispatch and of delivery. Wrenkin! Yes, Wrenkin the outdoor man, had taken charge: the strong individuality was bound to come to the top in a crisis. Sam noticed that as his open car drove slowly through the loose crowds in the front of the Palace, nobody seemed to recognize him. Perhaps the figure of Mrs. Blacklow confused the public gaze. He read the telegram again, putting it in his pocket, saying savagely to himself:

"I always knew that woman would kill herself one of these days--always driving in a dream!"

"How did you find me, Mrs. Blacklow?" he asked, in a very quiet, friendly voice.

"It came while Mr. Swetnam was out, sir--the telegram did. So I asked the hall porter to keep an eye on the office, as I couldn't lock it up, and I took a taxi straight to the Ministry and they sent me on here. When I told the policeman he let me through and showed me the way. The footman at the place where the car was waiting told me that you'd be out in a minute, and you were, sir."

"Not so ineffectual, after all," thought Sam, and said to her aloud: "You did very well."

Mrs. Blacklow's eyes shone with devotion. She seemed less pathetic and a little more self-reliant than before.

Sam began to organize his mind. At the door of the Ministry he said to the driver: "I want you to get some sandwiches, enough for me too, and be back here in a quarter of an hour. You'd better fill up. I shall want you to drive me to Moze at once, and quickly. We'll go along the Lea Bridge Road and through Chelmsford and Colchester. You understand. A quarter of an hour from now."

"Yes, my lord," the somewhat dandiacal girl answered smartly. And her eyes, too, shone with devotion. Mrs. Blacklow had doubtless informed her of the nature of the telegram.

"For service," thought Sam, "give me women."

When Lord Raingo arrived at Moze he found Wrenkin at the gates, shabby and curt as usual, but more communicative than was his wont. Every window blind was impressively drawn down.

"I saw your car down the hill, sir--my lord. I thought you'd be coming. The body's lying in the house." That was how Wrenkin began.

"Come this way and tell me about it," said Sam calmly. He preferred Wrenkin's account to any other.

"You can take the car round to the garage. It's behind the house on the left. Mind how you back in," Wrenkin gruffly instructed the chauffeur, without consulting his master. Then he followed Sam towards the copse on the upper slope of the hill, beyond the gardens.

Adela had left London on the previous day, alone in the big car, having told Sam on the telephone that she had decided to accept a telephone invitation to a bridge party at Frinton that evening. She had persisted for many days in driving Sam's big car. Wrenkin had discovered the car, in the early morning, overturned in a ditch, and Adela crushed underneath it, dead. The car's lights were then still faintly burning.

"Disfigured?"

"Not the face, sir. I got Skinner and the boy and between us we jacked up the car, and pulled her ladyship out. I sent Edith down for the police and the doctor, and as soon as I could I telegraphed for you. I'd no idea her ladyship was coming to Moze at all. She hadn't warned any of 'em in the house."

"And the car?"

"The car's still there, my lord."

"I never saw it as I came up."

"No, sir. It's on the Flittering road. That's what I couldn't make out, if she was coming from London."

"She wasn't," Sam explained.

Evidently Adela had driven straight from London to Frinton, and when the accident occurred was returning to Moze to sleep.

"She must have been going at a rare pace," said Wrenkin. "I know that car. It wouldn't turn over at any ordinary speed, and the ditch isn't deep. It happened at the bend in the lane just after you've passed the block-house at the corner of Adams's big field."

"We'll go and have a look at it," said Sam.

"Her ladyship has been a bit queer lately, my lord. Never spoke to me when she came. Nor to Skinner either."

"Lady Raingo was very worried," said Sam.

"About Mr. Geoffrey, my lord?"

"Yes."

"No news, my lord?"

"Not yet. There may be news at any moment."

"A nice home-coming for him when he does come!" Wrenkin observed resentfully.

They left the copse and the grounds, and walked down the hill facing the estuary.

"Those are my children," said Wrenkin, when they came in sight of the car. "I set 'em to watch the rugs and the timepiece and things. The sergeant said I'd better not move anything yet. I kept 'em from school."

Sam ignored the two little sentinels. The car lay with its wheels in the air, like a great maimed animal that had fallen and been struck stiff; an object most distressfully forlorn. Two of the wheels were twisted, and the front axle and the radiator. The clock was going, as indifferent as a god to human woe.

"Um!" Sam murmured.

"Her head was--"

"All right! All right! I understand," Sam stopped the description.

He pictured Adela under the car, lying there all through the night, with the lamps burning patiently around her, like the candles of a bier. For a moment he could not speak. Then he gave a shilling apiece to the boys, one of whom could not restrain an "O-oh!" of ecstasy at the incredible gift. He returned to the house. Old Skinner was in the darkened hall, dusting his coat with bony hand. Tears at once began to run down Skinner's cheeks. Two housemaids were in the back hall, one of them Edith. Edith sobbed when she saw her master.

"Come, come!" Sam expostulated sadly, and, noticing the servants no further, walked brisk and erect to his study.

"Send Wrenkin to me," he called out.

He was full of the thought that the affair was very complicated and must be thoroughly organized. He sat down and wrote: "My dear Timmerson. My wife has been killed in a motor accident. There will have to be an inquest and I must stay here for several days. I leave the Ministry in your able hands. But I wish to be kept au courant by special messenger of all that goes on. If necessary commandeer all the Ministry cars you may need, and send your news by men whom I can talk to confidentially and who know what is being done and why. Collins, for instance. And Dacres or Millingham. I should like Mayden, but probably he can't be spared. Please send also my typist and her machine and stationery. Have my mail collected from Berkeley Street and the Savoy, as well as anything in the Ministry, and send it on, will you? We are in the middle of most important work, as no one knows as well as yourself, and my private affairs must not be allowed to delay it for a moment. Before I left London I telephoned myself to the Postmaster-General and asked him to see personally that I had the telephone installed here. There is a post office telephone at Hoe, a mile and a half off, but of course none here. I see no reason why a field-telephone should not be installed to-morrow, pending something more permanent. I shall then be in touch. Please see to this. Yours sincerely, Raingo."

"I say, Wrenkin," he looked up. "Go and see that my chauffeur is being looked after. Let her have some petrol and tell her that I shall want her to go back to town at once. Then I'll get you to run down yourself to Hoe with some telegrams. And while you're there telephone to those undertakers at Colchester and ask them to send a man over here immediately, and he is to bring some samples of coffin plates and funeral cards."

Wrenkin returned in a moment.

"Dr. Heddle is here, sir. Will you see him?"

"I'll see everybody that comes. Tell the cook I'll have some tea and bread-and-butter and an egg. Remind her: three minutes and a half. I'll have it in here. I'll come out to Dr. Heddle."

He wrote a telegram to Swetnam to start for Moze at once. And then he wrote a short letter to Delphine, which he put in his pocket. Ultimately he confided it to the doctor to post; he would not give it to the trustworthy Wrenkin.

"Well, doctor," he said calmly in the hall. "It's good of you to come up like this at once. I wanted to see you very much."

That evening Sam went to see his wife for the second time. The first visit, formal and brief, had been more for the satisfaction of public opinion in the house than for his own. He unlocked the door of her room, lit the chandelier, lit the bed-lamp, and then extinguished the chandelier. The shade of the bed-lamp kept Adela's face in shadow. It was true, what Wrenkin had said--the face was not disfigured; the rest was hidden.

Sam had none of the uncanny feeling commonly experienced by those who are alone with the dead. If he turned his back to the bed he did not foolishly fear that the corpse might be looking at him by stealth. The sensation which he had was one of possession, of monopoly. "This is mine!" he thought, and bolted the three doors of the room. No one would disturb him, indeed he had sent the household to bed. He had Adela and the night. She lay in dignity and at rest. So she would lie in the blackness of the coffin, at everlasting rest. Nothing could annoy her, for ever and ever. It was thus that his imagination pictured her, and all visions of a future life seemed to be repellent. He wanted simply to think of her as at rest through endless ages.

He examined her lined, dry features, her rather wispy greying hair. Viewed close, she looked rather older than her years, yet at a little distance quite young, almost girlish. Suddenly he recalled her when she was a real girl, when she was carrying Geoffrey, and his own excited interest in the mysterious and somehow awe-inspiring progress of gestation. He would follow her about, guarding her like a porcelain vase that a rude touch might shiver. She never lost her dignity, even of carriage, during those months. Pathetic for her--it appeared to him now--that his interest had not been in herself, but in the unborn. For him she was the expectant mother of his child. For her, he was the indispensable originating preliminary to motherhood. After Geoffrey's birth his interest in her drooped and died, and hers in him. When Geoffrey went away she lived in a dream, played bridge in a dream, drove cars in a dream. Her home was part of the dream, seen dimly and negligently. She was a cold woman, and the habit of life with her made Sam cold too. He had forgotten love, until Delphine set him on fire. Adela was exasperating in her dreamy, careless calm. She was queer. . . . (But were they not all queer? Look at Delphine with her melancholia. He remembered a man saying to him one night, passionately emphatic: "All women are queer." It was so.) He felt only compassion for Adela. He mystically understood her at last. He had no resentment against her for her lamentable failure to make their home beautiful and comfortable and resistlessly attractive with constant solicitude and hospitality and agreeable friends. He had desired such a home more than anything; but she could not create it for him; she could not. She did not want to create it for him. She had rendered his wealth futile. Not her fault; nobody's fault.

He saw his home, this very home, refurnished as only a woman of taste with a vocation for the home could furnish it; shiningly clean, impeccably orderly, luxurious in every detail; maintained by contented, disciplined and efficient servants frequented by friends who came with eagerness and left with regret; himself basking in it and in the companionship of a woman young, lovely, ardent, and filled with a striving ambition to succeed in pleasing. The young creature took the shape of Delphine. . . . No! On this night he did not in his mind's eye see all this; he was too moved, too decent, too weary, to see it yet. But he foresaw the distant day when he might with propriety begin to visualize it. So far and no farther did his fancy go.

He opened the drawers of her desk, dismissing the notion that he was spying upon her. Someone must sooner or later delve into them, and he was the sole person to do it. A frightful disorder! Of course! Adela could seldom find anything when she looked for it. There were unopened letters; opened letters from acquaintances congratulating her on the peerage, saying what a wonderful man Sam was, sharing her hope that she would soon be presented at Court, giving addresses of marvellous dressmakers; a few bills; proofs of photographs of herself from Bond Street (she had said nothing to him about being photographed herself); samples of note-paper with crowns--or should they be called coronets?--in the top left-hand corner; envelopes to match; particulars of a hair-wash; seven packs of cards: aspirin, phenacetin, bicarbonate of soda, in phials; some orange sticks; eau de Cologne, no other scents; no rouge, no skin-foods (such as the youthful Delphine had); valuable jewels lying loose; three watches; a locket with an unrecognizable early portrait of Sam in it; thick packets of letters from Geoffrey, each most carefully tied up in violet ribbon; a little album filled exclusively with portraits of Geoffrey. . . . Yes, he was spying.

He shut all the drawers and moved away from the desk. Compassion! Sadness! Weariness! And again compassion? On the bed lay the symbol and summing up of all the war-grief and fatigue of the world. The universe was old and spent. The war continued desperately--but mechanically, of its own inertia of desperation. Where was Geoffrey? Where was her wandering boy to-night? Sid Jenkin had vanished. He, Sam, had come late into the war. Many who had come into it early had retired. Millions more were dead. But many who had come into it early were still doggedly and cheerfully labouring. Andrew Clyth, for instance. That man was astounding, a giant, with his mother, and his unseen cypher of a wife, and his Rosie Packer, and his Scotch broth. He deeply admired the fellow. The clock on the mantelpiece went ting-ting. Sam had been with his wife for three hours. He was desolate, weak with fatigue and emotion. But he thought that he was as good and as tireless a fighter as Andy Clyth, and he would prove it. He unbolted and opened the principal door, extinguished the bed-lamp, extinguished the chandelier, went out and locked the door on the outside.

"You'd better have a look at me, doctor," said Sam, glancing at his watch. "We've got nearly a quarter of an hour." He took the doctor's arm and they went into the study, where Mayden, who had been "spared" from the Ministry, was at work. "You needn't go, Mayden. You know my friend, Dr. Heddle, don't you?"

"I brought my stethoscope," said the doctor, disconcerting Sam somewhat by the implication.

All three men were in formal black, and the doctor held a silk hat. Sam loosed his waistcoat and lay down on the sofa, which he thought was not a great deal more comfortable than the terrible sofa in Heddle's surgery. Sam had decided to be examined, not because his heart was giving him disquiet, but because he had heard from Delphine that morning--a short letter in her enormous handwriting which reminded him of his promise to her to have himself examined every week. He felt that he ought to be very loyal to Delphine. She had kindness; he was her whole world; she trusted him.

In the three and a half days since Adela's death all had been done that had to be done. And yet Sam was not conscious of overstrain. He had directed others, kept an eye on everything, and been careful to do nothing himself but talk to people and make quick decisions upon data which he insisted should be stated briefly. Mayden, so debonair, sympathetic, and tranquil, had been the success of the affair, and Swetnam the failure. Admirably efficient and resourceful in Bucklersbury, E.C., Thos Swetnam lost his head in the strange environment of Moze, and Sam had to invent an urgent mission to London in order to send him back to his fixed habits and the domestic background of Raynes Park. Swetnam's downfall in the vast improvisation was not surprising, for the activity had been tremendous. The service of couriers by car and by train from London; the callers leaving cards; the deluge of telegrams of condolence, including one from the King and another, rather too elegiacally turned, from the Prime Minister; the incessant telephoning on the field-telephone worked from an understaffed village post office; the policeman, the coroner, the local jury; the journalists, including photographers; the undertaker's men, the archdeacon and other clergymen. All these factors amounted in total to something positively prodigious. Moze Hall did not know itself in the ordered turmoil. The entire district was in a state of acute excitement. And the entire country was reading front-page illustrated stories of the tragedy in five hundred newspapers.

If Sam had not had the first news as he was emerging from the King's presence public interest might have been less; but that chance detail, followed by the anecdotic news that the Minister, undeterred by private grief, had contrived to go on with his invaluable official work by dint of practically transferring the ministerial head-quarters to Moze Hall, had achieved for Sam in forty-eight hours a celebrity rivalling that of Andrew Clyth himself. Everybody in England and America and the Dominions now knew who Lord Raingo was, and what a terrific manner of man he was, and all about him. At that moment, while the doctor's ears caught the unsteady rumour of Sam's hidden heart, Mayden was classifying great piles of press-cuttings which had arrived from London at short intervals by courier. And in another room Miss Newman, the plump, soft, ministerial typist, was making long lists of senders of telegrams and letters, senders of wreaths, and callers. There was nothing that was not organized. And Sam was as well informed of the doings of the Ministry, especially in relation to the overseas-press visit, and of the true meaning of the minutes of the Cabinet meetings, as if he had never left London for an hour.

"I've come through," he said to himself, lying on the sofa, pleased with the aspect of affairs. And he wondered how soon he would be able to see Delphine. The thought of Delphine was his balm.

"Um!" mused Dr. Heddle deferentially, straightening his back. "It might be worse, Lord Raingo." His tone was not very reassuring, but Sam rejected his tone and accepted only the words.

"Ready, Mayden?" said Sam, buttoning his waistcoat, and adjusting his frock-coat.

In the hall waited the funeral guests; three ladies, including a sister of Adela's (who were not to attend the ceremony), three of Adela's male relatives, and the General Officer commanding the district, a great admirer of Adela's bridge playing. Sam had determined to have the funeral most strictly private, but he had not been able to evade the honour of the G.O.C.'s presence. The coffin was lifted from its trestles by Wrenkin, the decrepit Skinner, and two hired men, and put into the hearse and eclipsed in great masses of scent-giving flowers. Adela had left the house for ever. Wheels crunched the gravel of the broad drive. At the principal gate two policemen held back half the population of the peninsula. The postmaster's daughter ran in breathless with a telegram which Mayden opened and put in his pocket. The G.O.C. rode with Dr. Heddle; the three relatives travelled together, and Sam, irregularly, took Mayden in the chief mourner's coach. If Delphine was his balm, Mayden was his stand-by; he could not dispense with Mayden, who had never even set eyes on Adela. Wrenkin touched his best hat at the window of the coach.

"Shall I have the blinds drawn up, my lord?"

"Please do."

"What was that wire?" Sam asked, as the carriage rolled out of the demesne through the bareheaded crowd of country gapers.

"Private audience at the Palace on Monday morning at eleven," answered Mayden, producing the telegram.

"I don't want to see it," said Sam, and began to put on his black kid gloves.

Half-way down the hill towards Hoe church the procession surprisingly stopped. There were no onlookers here; nothing to be seen but the curving, narrow road and the hedges and the sloping fields with a tiled roof here and there bright in the chilly sunshine of noon.

"What's up?" Sam demanded, impatient at this flaw in the perfection of the arrangements.

Mayden glanced out of the carriage window. A young military officer was peering into the carriages. He came to Sam's carriage. He was tall and emaciated, with prominent eyes that had a permanent childlike stare of wonder at the world, and unruly hair that stuck out under his cap. His uniform, with the stars of a captain, did not fit him. A band of crêpe was loosely pinned round his left arm.

"Dad!" he breathed.

Sam could not speak for a second, so shocked and frightened was he by the intensity of his own emotion. At length he said quietly, casually:

"Get in, Jeff. Jump up. Don't let us keep her waiting here."

Mr. Mayden slipped lamely out by the other door, without a word, and joined the G.O.C. Geoffrey sat down by his father's side. The procession moved on. Geoffrey hid his face in his hands and sobbed.

"Is this more than I can bear?" Sam asked himself, afraid. Geoffrey controlled himself and put his hands on his thin, pointed knees. Sam took the boy's right wrist and gently squeezed it. He thought again: "Can I bear this?"

Geoffrey began to pull nervously at the front of his khaki collar, twitching his neck again and again to the right.

In the afternoon, when the funeral and late lunch were over, Geoffrey went out at once into the garden, refusing coffee. He almost ran into the garden. He had said nothing in the coach, either going or returning, and very little during the meal. Father and son had, indeed, talked about the weather. As soon as Sam had completed arrangements with Mayden for the departure to London, he put on his hat and started out with as matter-of-fact an air as possible to join Geoffrey.

He had decided that something was very wrong with Geoffrey, and he was debating with himself how to handle him for the best. He saw the boy as an intricate mechanism that was not functioning properly and that might stop or explode at a maladroit touch. He was frightened by the boy's manner, by his glance both dull and defiant, and by the altered tone of his voice. The boy seemed to be more boyish than ever, with his big, wondering eyes and his wiry, disorderly hair, and yet he seemed old too. He began again to fidget with his collar and twitch his neck to the right--rather like a bird on a branch that will make the same gesture a hundred times.

"If your collar isn't comfortable, Jeff, I might--"

"It's quite comfortable, thanks."

"Then why do you--?"

"Oh, I can't help that," said Geoffrey, with a sort of cold, calm resignation, as one who regarded himself quite objectively. "Can't you see it's a nervous tic? I've had it for six months."

Sam made no reply except: "Sorry!"

"Tell me about mother."

"Yes, I will. Let's go into the house. It's a bit chilly."

"No, no!" Geoffrey snapped. "Not inside. I had as much of that as I could stand with the ride to the church and back."

"All right, lad. Let's go for a walk then, shall we?" Sam suggested quietly, not at first catching Geoffrey's drift--or not caring to catch it. Sam's fear grew. He perceived that for Jeff he was not a father, but just some suspect individual whom Jeff happened to have met.

"I can't understand how you came to let her drive about by herself," said Geoffrey critically, when Sam had told all he knew and had heard.

"But, my lad, what was I to do? You know as well as I do that your poor mother always did just as she liked."

"You ought to have stopped her."

"Well, perhaps I ought. I don't say. But you must remember I was really very busy all day and every day at the Ministry."

"At the Palace, you mean. I've read all about you in the papers at The Hague. And I'm the b--y Honourable, I suppose. I'm surprised you should be working for that scoundrel Clyth. Responsible for all the mismanagement of the war He only got where he is because he happened to have someone over him who wouldn't stand up to him. All the best men thrown out, one after another. And look at the new lot. Good God! What a crew of circus-performers, liars, whore-mongers and millionaires! I saw some of the land defences here as I walked from Harwich. It's enough to make you laugh."

At this point Geoffrey suddenly sat down on a stile. Sam submissively halted and stood by his side.

"Thank God that's still there," Geoffrey added, gazing at the muddy ground.

"What?"

"That sea."

Beyond the creeks and banks of Mozewater was a faint blue line.

"Oh!"

Sam could think of nothing to say. He was amazed at the force and crudity of his son's views on things. He had thought that young soldiers were men who fought passionately for country, took orders, obeyed orders, and enjoyed themselves wildly when they could--and didn't argue nor reflect. Now he stood like a tongue-tied criminal at the judgment-seat of his fierce and dangerous son--yesterday a boy, to-day an old, damaged, disillusioned man. He could not answer back, he could offer no defence, partly because to do so would have angered the judge, and partly because the judge was a suffering victim whom it would be cruel to put in the wrong. Geoffrey was somewhat sacrosanct. And Geoffrey kept twitching at his collar and writhing his neck. Sam had foreseen nothing of the situation in which he found himself as he gazed sadly and hopelessly across the beautiful, wide landscape--and could have foreseen nothing.

"Got a gasper?"

Sam hadn't.

"Oh, never mind. What does it matter?"

The hope of the Raingo family, the darling of his mother and the pride of his father, the young man scientifically educated according to the best and latest educational theories, stood up and shook his slacks and spat, glowering.

"Did you get any cigarettes--over there?" Sam asked, determined at any rate to achieve some small talk and hoping to lead Jeff to an account of his adventures.

"Not enough."

"I expect you had some roughish times."

"Oh, that's nothing. They treated their own fellows just as badly as they treated us. And their men hated them as much as we hated 'em."

"You saw that for yourself, eh?"

"Did I see it for myself! I should say!"

"How?"

"How? Because you had me taught German and Germany a damn' sight too well. When I got away the first time, and stole a regular outfit of clothes from a shop in Gronau and they bagged me in the middle of some infernal river or other, they took me for a German deserter. I suppose I must look German! Anyhow they would have it I was a Boche. That's how I know the way they treat their own fellows and what their own fellows think of them. I've lived in a German military prison for Germans. I know what it is. And I can't say I cared much for it. No doubt it was all right, but the fact is, I haven't got a natural taste for prisons or for trenches either. Not as a permanent residence. The food might have been better; also the company. Now you might like solitary confinement. I didn't. But you might. Shut yourself up in your bath-room for a week and try it. Only the water must be turned off of course. Should be worth trying as an experience. Then you'll be able to talk to me, dad."

Sam's soul fastened on to the word "dad," which he had not heard since the morning. The glimpse of his son's odyssey in the land beyond the faint blue line fascinated and appalled him. But he dared not ask for more. What perfect German his son must speak!

Sam mentioned his own work, but Geoffrey obviously felt no interest in it. His casual "Yes" showed disdain as well as indifference. Sam accepted the unfilial affront with a gentle smile, thinking: "Poor fellow! Perhaps it's good for me." He recalled the Sermon on the Mount, and observed the changes in himself with strange curiosity.

Then he tried again for details about Geoffrey's adventures. Nothing was vouchsafed to him. Similarly about the lad's original capture in the field: nothing. Similarly about the companion of his escape, Jim Hylton: not an enlightening word! Geoffrey did not at first even trouble to open his mouth when Sam said that Adela had tried to see Jim but had failed because Jim had left London and nobody seemed to know where he had gone. After a few moments Geoffrey remarked sardonically: "I'm not surprised."

"I've got to have a smoke," Geoffrey burst out, at the end of another pause, and jumped up.

"Plenty at home," said Sam soothingly.

Geoffrey set off in silence towards the house, Sam keeping by his side.

As they entered the grounds Sam asked as to Geoffrey's kit.

"Haven't any kit. What I'm wearing I had to borrow."

"I'll give orders then."

"You needn't. It doesn't matter."

"And I'll see to your room. I'm the housekeeper for the present. I never succeeded in persuading your mother to have a regular housekeeper. I shall have to get one from somewhere." He smiled gravely.

"Shan't want a room."

"Of course you will want a room," said Sam firmly. Geoffrey turned on him:

"I can't sleep in a room."

Sam was dashed, more alarmed and perplexed than ever. "Then where shall you sleep?"

"Oh, anywhere. In the garden. Under the big cedar."

"But look here, they'll think you have taken leave of your senses."

"So I have."

There was a box of cigarettes in the hall. Geoffrey seized a dozen and slipped them into the pocket of his tunic; Sam took one, and they both smoked, standing aimlessly in the large hall with the front door open.

"I say, sonnie," Sam began to plead ingratiatingly. "Don't sleep outside; to please me."

"Oh, all right!" Geoffrey answered gruffly, but with the first touch of good nature that Sam had noticed in him. "I'll sleep here in the hall, near the front door, and have the door open. That satisfy you?"

"Claustrophobia," thought Sam apprehensively. But the slight change in Geoffrey's voice eased his mind somewhat. The lad was not quite insensible to an appeal.

"What a deuce of an ugly place this hall is!" said Geoffrey, glancing round. "But of course the mater never had any taste. She couldn't help it, but she had no taste in these things." He spoke quite kindly, if realistically.

Sam was astonished, and very pleased thus to see traces of himself in the boy. This was the only hint he had ever had that his son cared for interiors or had a critical attitude in such matters towards his mother. "Yet why should I be astonished?" he asked himself.

"I was taken to a lovely house at The Hague," said Geoffrey, with a smile. "By Jove! They understand furniture, the Dutch do! But it must have taken a couple of hundred years to fix up that house."

"Tell me about ii."

Geoffrey complied.

Sam's mind was still more eased.

"I wish you'd refurnish this place for me," said he eagerly.

"Can't." Geoffrey's voice was rough again.

"Why can't you?"

"I shall have to report for duty," he said, with savage disgust.

"Not you?"

"Of course I must."

"I can see to that for you," said Sam with assurance.

"I dare say you can, but it wouldn't do." Geoffrey's tone, however, was not very positive.

"Perhaps it wouldn't," Sam diplomatically agreed, determined nevertheless that Geoffrey should not serve again. He went on, dropping the subject: "Afraid the maids will disturb you here in the morning. . . . I'll stop 'em."

"Let 'em all come," cried Geoffrey. " I like to hear 'em talking. That was the one blot on my otherwise charming holiday in the land of lager beer. Never heard an English girl talking. I'd have given my eyesight to hear that sometimes. . . . I'll tell you the worst thing that happened to me in Germany. I was sitting in a full tramcar and an awfully nice young female Boche got in. I was just jumping up to give her my seat, but I remembered I was in Germany, where they don't do such things, and if I'd got up for her I might have been copped for an Englander. So I had to see her stand. It was awful." He banged the hall-table furiously.

Sam was pleased, but alarmed again. Why all this fuss about not standing up in a tramcar for a fräulein? The boy's mind was sick. Claustrophobia. And what else? He looked at his son foolishly.

Then Mayden came into the hall. Geoffrey moved to the doorway and turned his back.

"There are two journalist fellows to see you, sir. They've been waiting some time. I haven't said you'd see them."

"I'll see 'em," said Sam, and to Geoffrey, approaching him and putting a hand lightly on his shoulder: "See here, brother. I'm off to London early to-morrow morning. Must. Will you drive up with me?"

"No."

"Sooner stay here, eh?"

"I don't know about sooner stay here. But no London for me, till I've got to."

"Anyhow, I'll see you at tea-time." Sam felt as though his own brain was giving way before the enigma of Geoffrey's mental state. Geoffrey absorbed him in the most painful manner. Adela was scarcely buried. Till the appearance of Geoffrey he had been absorbed in retrospective compassion for her. But now he could not keep his mind on Adela for a moment. She had vanished away from him, and seemingly from Geoffrey too.

"I must go and have a look at mother's room," said Geoffrey, and went off crying. The transient scene was terrible. Sam glanced at Mayden for sympathy. Mayden softly met his gaze. . . . Politics! Titles! Propaganda! What odious, contemptible tinsel and mockery. Here was the war itself, tragedy, utterly distracted fatherhood.

When Sam went back to the Ministry of Records the sympathetic woe of his staff was rather difficult to bear. He wanted everybody to behave to him as though nothing had happened. After all, the Ministry was the Ministry, and his domestic affairs private to himself. But nobody would. With scarcely an exception--the chief exception being Mayden--all seemed determined to treat him as a creature set apart and afflicted by heaven; they adopted a special tone of voice for him, and in argument agreed with him too quickly and often quite insincerely; he might have been a sick man whom it was advisable to humour lest his illness should get the better of him. Sam well knew that he was under a severe strain, that he had as much anxiety and distress as he could cope with; but he felt equal to the situation if only those around him would conduct themselves naturally and cheerfully. Moreover, there were compensations, or at least there was a compensation--the existence of Delphine.

The worst sinner was Sir Ernest Timmerson, who indeed did appreciate the importance of cheerfulness, but whose cheerfulness was even more desolating than all the well-meant exhibitions of sympathetic grief. Sir Ernest monopolized Sam. He insisted on rendering to Sam an exhaustive account of his stewardship, which, however, had been no stewardship, seeing that Sam had not for an hour during the week lost directive touch with Ministerial activities. And in Sir Ernest's demeanour was latent some implacable jealousy of the favourite Mayden, which had to be soothed. Finally, Sir Ernest invited Sam to a tête-à-tête dinner that night at his flat.

"Couldn't we make it to-morrow night?" Sam suggested, instead of saying positively and instantly, as he ought to have done, that he had another engagement.

"To-morrow I have that Rumanian dinner," said Timmerson. "I'd like you to come to-night."

"Well, you must come and dine with me at the Savoy," said Sam.

"If you prefer it," Timmerson agreed, hurt. "But I've not yet had the pleasure of entertaining you, and in these sad circumstances, I should have liked just to show--"

Sam, nervously exasperated, had a tremendous impulse to abandon discretion and even decency, and shout: "Oh, go to the devil with your sad circumstances. I intend to dine tonight with someone I'm very fond of, and so now you know!" But he controlled himself by a great effort, shuddered inwardly at the revelation of the state of his nerves, and said eagerly, with a gentle smile:

"My dear fellow, of course I'll come. It's most kind of you. But you'll let me leave early, won't you?"

Sir Ernest displayed his deep, flattered satisfaction by fussily arranging his wrist-bands.

Sam telephoned to Delphine that he would be with her at ten-thirty. The sweet, agitating sound of her voice lived in his ears. He listened to it, summoning it back when it left him, throughout the arid afternoon of hard, detailed work. At last he said to himself: "I must see her beforehand. I can't go through with that dreadful dinner unless I've seen her. And I won't." And he got Timmerson to fix the dinner for nine o'clock, saying mysteriously that he had had an important summons. At half-past six he dismissed his chauffeur and started for Orange Street. He let all affairs of State fall out of his mind. He even forced the harrowing thought of Geoffrey aside and concentrated his whole soul upon the image of Delphine. He yearned painfully for the solace of her presence, her soft gaze, the touch of her hands. And yet, as he crossed Leicester Square in the lowering twilight, he was afraid, and unconsciously slackened his pace.

A difficult encounter! He had been an adulterer, and though he was so no longer, he was in effect leaving the fresh grave of his wife to join his mistress. The nicest tact on the part of both himself and Delphine would be required, to preserve that first meeting from offence. Joy, even if secretly felt, would be out of place if it found expression. The sad compassion which lay in his heart for Adela must dominate the scene. Yes, a difficult encounter, and while longing for it he feared it and would be relieved when it was over.

Nor was that all. There was something baser in his trouble, something that he hated to acknowledge to himself. He had not warned Delphine that he would come earlier than the hour of the rendezvous. Horrible and unjust thought; supposing that she were not alone! Here he was, loving her, wanting desperately to be with her; and yet jealous, and yet mistrusting her! The truth was that he had never entirely recovered from the shock of seeing her with the young officer at the Savoy. The obstinate suspicion was a monstrous insult to her; it convicted him of illogicalness, unreason, and viler faults. But he could not help it. Jealousy, the most terrible affliction possible to a human being in love, was too strong for him. He suffered in shame. And the real basis of his mental disorder was the inability to believe that he, middle-aged and worn by life, was capable of holding and satisfying her youthfulness. How could he rationally have such bold confidence in himself? Youth wanted youth, and he was middle-aged, inelastic, not bubbling with vitality and zest. Useless to say:

"Nerves! Fatigue!"

He unlocked the front door in Orange Street, and climbed the first flight of stairs. And through the door of the office on the first floor he distinctly heard the murmur of voices. He pushed at the door fearfully, as though his doom lay on the other side of it. Delphine was stitching at a familiar old green dress, and she was crying; he could see the tears rolling down her cheeks under the electric light. And near her was standing a younger girl, with no frock on, her bosom half exposed. After a second's hesitation he recalled her; it was Gwen, Delphine's half-sister, whom he had once seen for a moment asleep in Delphine's bed. Both women screamed, and then Gwen, blushing painfully, began to cry also, in her affronted modesty. How odd and out of place they looked amid the masculine, business-like office furniture. The desk was covered with dressmaking litter, and there were bits of stuff on the floor.

"Sorry! Sorry!" said Sam, just as disturbed as either of the girls, and drew back on to the landing. But he felt happy; the torture of jealousy, frightful from the moment when he heard voices till the moment when the interior of the room was revealed to him, had gone.

"Go upstairs will you, Sam?" said Delphine, showing her head. "I'll be up in a minute." She seemed to be quite calm. Sam obeyed.

"But why was she crying?" he thought apprehensively. And in a moment jealousy, from no apparent cause, began once again to invade his mind.

"This jealous feeling is a disease," he said to himself, and tried to master it. "I won't have it," he said to himself. He was standing in the drawing-room when the half-sisters arrived, laden with the green dress, some pieces of stuff, and the sewing-gear. Sam was self-conscious, and the two girls felt much more so. Sam did not like the situation, he felt out of place. Tenderness for Delphine had left him. He had come for solace, and had found only a new complexity in his life.

"Gwennie," said Delphine, "this is Lord Raingo. Come now, put those things down and shake hands with him."

Gwen was tremendously abashed, having never to her knowledge set eyes on a lord before, still less shaken hands with one. Sam smiled, and warmly clasped her thin, rough, delicate hand. She made a very sharp contrast to Delphine. She was short, slight, fragile, very fair, and much younger than Delphine. The two were alike in one point only: they were both beautiful. Gwen was certainly the more beautiful. Her beauty was surpassing, and its fragility made an unconscious appeal to the beholder, almost painful in its intensity. Every man who saw her would have an instinct to befriend and protect and save her from the assaults of the world. In the brief, shadowed glimpse of her, as she lay asleep, Sam had failed properly to appreciate her physical qualities. The notion of such a girl being a bus-conductor, or even a shop-assistant, was monstrously offensive. Sam could scarcely bear to think of it. Something must positively be done for her. There she stood, over-faced and dumb and apologetic in her plain brown dress, without a jewel, without an ornament, and by right of the contours of her cheeks and lips and the exquisite curves of her ears and nostrils, and her large, wistful frightened eyes and superb blonde hair, she was entitled for her advantage to adoration, power, and the costliest luxuries of attire, precious stones, and environment that worship could offer.

Delphine, effulgent and mature beside her, had the air more of an aunt than of a sister. Sam was glad of this; it aged the glorious dark Delphine, and thus helped to justify the relation between Delphine and himself.

"I'm dreadfully sorry I disturbed you like that, without any warning," said Sam, benevolently retaining the slim hand. "You must excuse me."

"Oh, that's all right," Gwen murmured, with a short, nervous laugh, blushing afresh.

"Run into the kitchen, dear, and see how our bite of supper's getting on," said Delphine. It was an invitation to Gwen to leave her sister and his lordship alone together.

"Yes, I will," said the young girl, with eager deference. How could she not be deferential to an elder sister who so familiarly addressed a lord as "Sam"

When she had gone Delphine still stood away from Sam, in constraint.

"Sam," said she. "I hope you don't mind--I told her about us. She's all right. She knows what things are. You needn't be afraid."

"I'm not," Sam answered. "You did well. Why shouldn't she know? She seems an awfully nice sort."

"Well, I couldn't help telling her. I thought you said on the telephone half-past ten."

"So I did. But my dinner's put off till nine, and I thought I'd come here first." He smiled oddly, like a boy.

"Oh, Sam," she exclaimed, running to him and putting her arms round his neck and kissing him gravely. "I am so glad to see you. I haven't seen you for years. I suppose you know that. Years." She went on, withdrawing her face, and gazing at him and shifting her arms to his waist: "We were altering one of my old frocks for her, and I thought it would be less messy if I did it downstairs. You don't object, do you?"

"Is it possible," Sam mused, "that this wonderful creature is as fond of me as she seems?" For Delphine seemed to idolize him more than ever, to be gloating passionately over his reappearance. He said aloud: "If you ask me any more questions like that I shall have to smack you, my child." She smiled, making a faint gurgling noise in the throat.

"Delphine, why were you crying when I came in?" he asked seriously.

She hid her face on his shoulder for a moment, and then, without raising it, replied semi-articulately: "I was telling her all you'd been through. I couldn't help crying. But I'm awfully sorry I was crying. I did want to comfort you when you came, and there I was crying! I don't mean I wanted to be jolly and happy and all that. I knew you couldn't be very cheerful--it wouldn't be quite right, would it?--I only wanted to be a bit of comfort to you in your sorrow. . . . As if it wasn't enough you being told of your wife's death just as you were coming out of the Palace! And then, on the top of that, your son meeting the funeral procession! Sam, what you've been through! And your son's adventures in Germany. Him wanting to hear an English girl's voice, and not daring to stand up in a tram for a German girl because German men don't do that sort of thing."

"But who told you all this?"

"Why! Isn't it all in the newspapers! When I read it in one paper I went out and got some more to see if there was anything else in any of the others. But they were all the same." She lifted her head and pointed to a pile of papers on a chair.

"Of course," said Sam, who had seen every daily in London morning and evening.

It was wonderful how the information which he had amiably given to some journalists on the previous afternoon at Moze was spread abroad in a few hours throughout the land, and no doubt throughout the world. But news items of such quality were, he knew, rare enough in Fleet Street.

"Why!" said Delphine. "There's nothing but you in the papers to-day! . . . Excuse me a minute, Sam. I must just see Gwen isn't spoiling the--" She hurried away without finishing her sentence.

Sam thought:

"That wasn't what she was crying for. She was crying for something else, that she doesn't want me to know about, and she's gone out to tell her sister what she said to me, so that there won't be any bungling when her sister comes back. That's it. . . . What a beast I am, though!" But the jealous, horrible thought stuck in his mind.

"Lay another place, Gwen," said Delphine.

"But I can't eat here," said Sam. "I'm dining out."

"But not till nine o'clock."

Gwen hesitated, waiting for a decision by the two high beings.

"Still, I can't eat two dinners."

"I'm not asking you to, darling. But you can eat something here, and a bit less at the other place."

Delphine spoke with a loving appeal--an appeal, however, in which there was authority, and such authority as she had never before shown. No doubt she had the human weakness to display in front of the humble and frightened Gwen her power over the great man; but there was more than that in Delphine's tone. There was the obscure consciousness that she was now the sole woman in Sam's life and hence that she had the right to influence him for their common good.

Sam, far from resenting this altered attitude, liked it. He liked to see her dominating him and to yield to her command. He even liked to be so openly called "darling" in front of the young girl. And he was very pleased to see Gwen's adoring awe of Delphine. Delphine seemed to have much more individuality than Gwen.

He had another vision of Moze Hall splendidly and tastefully refurnished from top to bottom, and Delphine the mistress of it. The vision of it appeared to be nearer now. Nor did it strike him as unseemly that he should be entertaining such a vision so soon after Adela's funeral. Would Delphine, he asked himself again, be equal to the part? Could she hold her own against those ministerial wives of whom, when he was in the Commons, he used to hear such strange, quaint, piquant, contradictory tales, but about whom, since his ascension to office, not a word of gossip had been uttered to him by anybody? He decided in Delphine's favour. Already she had learnt a lot, and she could learn a lot more. He toyed with the idea, half seriously.

Gwen laid the plate, and they sat down to a meal which. reminded him pleasantly of meals in Eccles, in the eighties.

"I showed Gwen your picture in Punch," said Delphine.

"And what did you think of it, Gwen?" Sam asked. He felt quite at ease in a sort of old Eccles atmosphere.

Gwen was flustered at the call to take part in the conversation.

"I don't know," she stammered. "They've made your necktie too big."

"Ah! But you see you must exaggerate in a caricature."

"I don't think I like caricatures," said Gwen simply.

"But fancy having your picture in Punch!" said Delphine, not quite pleased at Gwen's dislike of caricatures. " My word, Sam. You are in the papers!"

Sam said nothing, but he admitted to himself that he indeed was in the papers--no one more so, except Andy. He was eager to examine the packet of press-cuttings which would arrive the next morning. At the same time his publicity was due so much to the drama of private affairs that he did not care to dwell on it. In fact he was secretly ashamed of it, though he had brought it about only in the interests of the Ministry, which to be effective could not be advertised too extensively. Delphine read his thoughts, and changed the conversation.

"Gwen's only here because the shop's closed."

"Kingston?"

"Yes. The proprietor's going to be called up--he's forty-six, but he'll have to go--he's been told. There's nobody to take his place when he does go, and as he had an offer for the business he's selling at once. The shop's closed for stock-taking this afternoon. He'll be nearly ruined. It does seem a shame, doesn't it?"

The conversation flowed sombrely, as was meet. The shadow of the war had darkened the room.

Then Gwen had to leave. Sam was told that she must be back in Kingston by eight-thirty. He suspected that Delphine had instructed her to leave early--perhaps that was the reason of the visit to the kitchen. The half-sisters held a colloquy on the green frock, which was made up into a parcel. Delphine gave Gwen the parcel. Sam shook hands, and both girls went downstairs.

When Delphine returned Sam said:

"I say, you really must let me do something for your sister. I like her. She's very nice, and the prettiest thing I ever saw in my life. I'm sure she's no ordinary young woman." He strongly desired to help Gwen. It seemed to him odious, unbearable, that so much of his income should remain futile, heaping itself together for no end, when Gwen was wasting her lovely youth in a shop at Kingston. He knew that it was the business of everyone to work, but if Gwen was to work he wished her to work in ideal conditions. In truth, however, he did not wish her to work at all. He could not bear to be happy with Delphine while her sister was out unsheltered in the world. He wondered whether he might find a place for her in the ministry--no, that wouldn't do. Or perhaps at Moze.

"Yes, she's a nice child," Delphine answered absently.

She put Sam in the arm-chair and sat herself on the arm of the chair, and laid her hand as it were diffidently on his shoulder. Then she rose and extinguished all the lights except one, and returned to the chair and laid her hand again in exactly the same place on his shoulder.

"Oh, Sam!" she breathed. "When will the war be over? I don't feel I can stand it much longer."

An unexpected remark! Her melancholia! He could feel the dark mood creeping upon her. Apparently she didn't want any answer to her question.

And beneath her melancholia was something else. He did not know what. By one of those intuitions which are certainly not the monopoly of women he divined that she had a secret from him, that her attitude was subtly prevaricating. Why was she crying when he first saw her? Could a woman love two men at once? (For he was sure that she was fond of himself.) Could he love and respect her and yet believe her capable of duplicity? Strange! He could! He felt descending upon him the balm which he had longed for. It came through the mere touch of her hand on his shoulder. Not from her eyes, for she was looking fixedly at the glowing bars of the electric stove. He thought of the complex variety of his life; publicity, fame, official power and work, Adela newly in her grave, Gwen laboriously getting back to her prison in Kingston. His wealth, his schemes, his chicane, and this beautiful woman here sitting on the arm of his chair and somehow deceiving him. But he was solaced. His heart grew larger, till it was large enough to hold every experience in kindliness. He must await with indulgent fortitude whatever might come. The hour was marvellous, and he was thankful to be alive.

Sam had another marvellous hour, of quite a different kind, when Colonel the Right Honourable Sir Rupert Afflock, Baronet, M.P., J.P., F.R.S., and a whole string of other affixed abbreviations, entered the Minister's room at the Burleigh Hotel by telephonic appointment on a certain afternoon.

Sam had known Afflock slightly in the House of Commons, and he knew him to be a man of many parts. But a special study of Who's Who, wherein his biography was given at great length and yet in a highly condensed form, showed that the parts of Afflock were much more numerous than Sam had supposed. Educated in England, the United States, France and Germany, Sir Rupert had gone early into politics and into the House, had inaugurated various international movements--as, for example, the movement for the preservation of languages falling out of use--and presided over scores of international committees. He had edited journals and written books. He had invented an automatic brake and a propeller for ships, and a patent medicine, and a system of phonetics. He had travelled over all the world. Eleven foreign orders had been bestowed upon him (and three on his wife). His colonelcy (of Yeomanry) was a mere ornament, but an elegant one, and useful. He was a recognized authority on forestry, rotation of crops, wireless telegraphy, medieval manuscripts, international law, physics, the Far East, Parliamentary procedure, and half a hundred other subjects--not including, until recently, military administration. Hence, in accordance with the British tradition against employing experts in the high offices of state, he had been made Secretary for War.

He was the most prodigious worker in the Government--with the probable exception of the Earl of Ockleford. He had also the reputation of being, after Andrew Clyth himself, the most finished and dangerous plotter and schemer on the Front Bench. At the moment the blight on his life was that he had not been included in the War Cabinet.

Perhaps his greatest gift, not counting industry, application and natural talent, was that he knew how to wait. When he had waited for something and got it, he at once, without wasting a moment, began to wait for something else.

Sam went half-way to the door to meet him and greet with bright smiles and deference, as the biggest nob that had ever entered that room in Sam's time. He was a little, black-haired, dark-complexioned man, in a long frock-coat, with a quiet apologetic style, and a trick of raising his black eyebrows. Sam stood over him during the first exchanges. Sam, being a biggish man, had a theory, ignoring the instance of Napoleon, that little men had little minds, and the theory now warmed his heart. He knew that Afflock was held to be dangerous, but he did not care. He defied danger and was thereby uplifted. He had the august and tiny War Minister in his parlour, and the War Minister was the first of the major ministers to venture into his parlour. Sam was no longer a widower, a lover, a father. He was a statesman; he was the holder of the rich purse of Secret Service money, and Sir Rupert, head of the vast and bullying machine for war on land, wanted some of his money and would have to ask for it. Sam feigned to be impressed and nervous.

"My dear Sir Rupert," said he, when they had both sat down. "May I offer you a cigarette?"

"Thank you. I don't smoke. I'm sorry."

"Shall you mind if I have a gasper?"

"Well, if it's a gasper--" said Sir Rupert, and took one.

They lit gaspers from one match.

"First of all," said Sam, "I owe you an apology."

"Surely not," protested Sir Rupert leniently. "Surely not."

"Well, then, say an explanation. Somebody in one of your M.I. sections telephoned up here yesterday to ask whether we could send a man down to the War Office to produce documents giving certain information which we have in our possession. Our reply was that perhaps the officer in question could spare a moment to step in here and examine the documents on the files." And Sam, assuming his eyeglasses and beaming timidly over them at Sir Rupert, added to himself, "Yes, you piccaninny, that was our reply to the infernal impudence of your Whitehall circus."

"That seems quite a proper and reasonable suggestion," said Sir Rupert, twinkling darkly.

"No," said Sam. "It was neither proper nor reasonable. And that is why I owe you an apology. We had forgotten that there is in existence a War Office order forbidding officers of the M.I. to enter this building under any pretext whatever." And Sam added to himself: "I also have known how to wait."

Sir Rupert at once broke into placatory and diplomatic smiles.

"I assure you," he said, "I have never heard of such an order."

"I am convinced of it," said Sam, with smiles rivalling Sir Rupert's own. "It would be absurd to expect you to deal personally with all the details of interdepartmental procedure. Besides, I dare say that your M.I. people had very good reason for issuing the order. After all, what are we--in this hotel? Mushrooms, my dear Afflock."

"But are you sure about this order?"

"Quite."

"How did you know of it?"

"Ah! Knowing is the speciality of this hotel. Either we know--or we are nothing."

"But I really--"

"I'll send for Timmerson. You know Sir Ernest Timmerson. He's really the brains of this place. I'm only a learner."

"Timmerson! Known him for years, of course! We've sat on more than one committee together. I remember I was chairman--"

Sam rang for a secretary and said he would be glad to see Sir Ernest if Sir Ernest could make it quite convenient to come along. He noticed that the War Minister's benevolence of demeanour had not diminished; neither was he cast down; on the other hand he had quite lost the apologetic air which had marked his entrance.

Timmerson, as the guardian of his own dignity, knew better than to run in immediately at Sam's summons, and while they were waiting for him, Sam said to Afflock, in a confidential, trustful tone:

"I'm very glad you've come to see me, Afflock. I had thought of mentioning this matter of the excluding order to the Prime Minister. I was pressed to do so, here. As you know, I'm one of Clyth's oldest friends--in fact, I'm the oldest friend he has. But I really don't want to bother him about it--at any rate until you'd seen me. I felt quite sure that you and I would soon come to understand one another." Every phrase was a dart that stuck in Afflock's susceptible hide.

"I'm convinced we shall understand one another," Afflock agreed firmly. "As I say, I never heard of the order till you told me about it."

"Just so," said Sam, and to himself: "That naturally is a whopper. But never mind."

Sir Ernest and Sir Rupert met with the loving exuberance of fast friends whom destiny had long been cruelly separating. They called each other Rupert and Ernest amid delightful shows of mutual affection. Sir Ernest related his information about the order, treating it as a sort of family affray between much-attached cousins, and not to be taken seriously. Sam had instructed him in the method of approach.

"Now, of course, Rupert," said Sir Ernest, raising a playful finger, "you're not going to ask me to name names. In the circumstances that wouldn't quite do, would it?"

"It would not!" Sir Rupert admitted bravely.

"I ought to tell you, Afflock," Sam broke in, inventing interesting details to enliven the case, "that I've got to send away those documents that your people want to see--to-night. If your people want them urgently, perhaps you'd like to telephone yourself now and give instructions for someone to come along without delay."

"Yes," said Sir Ernest. "Tell 'em to ask for me. We're only too anxious to be of service to any other Ministry."

While Sir Rupert was telephoning in an august and autocratic voice that went ill with his stature, Sam winked at Timmerson. The minister in him, indeed, the whole man, was exceedingly happy. "A moment like this," he thought joyously and recklessly, "is what I have lived for," and added, recalling with a start his high resolves: "It also makes for efficiency in the conduct of the war."

Within a few weeks he had become one of the leading figures in the newspapers--the very darling of the press. The number of his press-cuttings was increasing weekly. The state of the war was improving. The morale of the country was improving, and the improvement was attributed quite as much to the activities of the Minister of Records as to the operations in the field. He was a peer dealing with a commoner. He was fighting the battle of the mushroom ministries against the overbearing jealousy of the older ministries--and he was winning it. Everybody in his own ministry would soon know what was now passing and would revere him and rejoice accordingly. He was proving the strength of his qualities, and the reality of his power. He exulted.

He exulted even in the risks which he ran in humiliating so ingenious and patient a person as Sir Rupert Afflock. He knew that if Afflock had not shown fight it was probably because Afflock was waiting for a better tactical position. But he deemed himself as clever a tactician as Afflock; in the meantime he had scored, and the victory would mean prestige wherever statesmen, parliamentarians, officials, or organizers, were gathered together. His exultation flowed triumphantly over private griefs and anxieties, and over the apprehensions and the gloom of the patriot in him. He was gloriously living, and if his heart played him false and he dropped down dead that minute, his last thought would be: "I have lived." He knew now all the fascinations of office save one--the oratorical triumph, which he did not hope for.

At the end of the telephoning he said, sunning himself in Timmerson's gleeful gaze of admiration:

"Possibly you might care to send a chit, Afflock, to say that either the order never existed or has ceased to exist." He went on quietly, giving Afflock no chance to say Yes or No: "And now what can I do for you, my dear Afflock . . . Don't go, Timmerson . . . . I have no secrets from Timmerson. Sir Rupert wants our authority for some Secret Service money."

Whereupon Afflock gave a sketch of a scheme for a spying expedition into Austria, to be carried out by disaffected Austrians who had brought with them into Switzerland bad memories of unjust treatment under German commands and a conviction that the brightest hope for Austria was a quick peace at no matter what price.

"I needn't ask you if you're sure of your tools," said Sam grandly; and to himself: "More money going to be wasted by these military simpletons! But who cares?" And after a little more talk he graciously accorded the official permit, and Sir Rupert Afflock, departing, had to assume the demeanour of one who has been granted a very considerable favour.

"There's an enemy there," said Timmerson uneasily, when Afflock had gone.

"I agree," said Sam. "But he asked for trouble before we did. It's a pity he's such a dwarf--they're so damned cunning--especially when they don't say much."

Lord Raingo went into his Club for lunch one day. He had called in at Christie's to see how Geoffrey (who had been granted indefinite leave and had put himself in the hands of a psychoanalyst from Cambridge) was getting on at a sale of antique furniture. Geoffrey, with unlimited credit behind him, was almost passionately engaged in the refurnishing of Moze Hall; he would not quit the sale-rooms either for lunch or anything else.

The hour was half-past one, and the great coffee-room of the Club was nearly filled with lunch-habitués. Sam stood hesitant just within the east door. An old head-waiter, who never forgot a face, a name, or a dignity, greeted him

"Good morning, my lord."

This was his first visit to the Club since his elevation and immense notoriety in the land. The tone of the head-waiter reassured him somewhat, but not enough. He felt instantly, as an actor might, the attitude of the public of the Club, and knew that it was curious and critical rather than sympathetic. Various tables were occupied by groups of intimates who met there four or five times a week, each group a little world, and whose ideal of conversation was ruthless, cheerful freedom to say whatever happened to come into the head. Sam caught them slyly glancing at him and then making remarks to one another. Celebrity and prestige in the land counted no more in the Club than in the House of Commons. In particular, millionaires and famous statesmen were not received with any excessive gusto unless, as happened but rarely, they had established themselves first as clubmen. Sam had never been a marked success in the Club, not because he did not want to be, nor because he assumed those airs which a club resents, but because despite certain quiet, uncultivated social gifts, he was a solitary by disposition and was anyhow more at home with women than with men. Moreover, he was handicapped by front-page publicity in the popular press; a phenomenon always regarded with suspicion by a collection of men familiar with the inside of things.

He walked about looking for a chair. He passed the cronies from his own Ministry, Messrs. Drakefield and Crawshaw. At their table was an empty chair. They nodded to him, but did not suggest that he should join them; perhaps they lacked courage; certainly Sam lacked the courage to join them. At length he sat down at a table for four where were two men whom he did not know and who apparently did not know him. They ignored him--not even a club nod, not even the passing of the menu-card. He wrote out his order which, as was meet, was zealously taken charge of by the head-waiter himself. Sam ate alone and forlorn in the buzzing room. Half-way through the meal the head-waiter arrived again and, bending down, said in Sam's ear:

"Mr. Sid Jenkin is asking for you, my lord."

"Bring him in, will you?"

Sid Jenkin was brought in, smiling and twinkling. On the way to Sam's table he shook hands with several men. He beamed with ingenuous and yet shrewd pleasure at finding genial, welcoming acquaintances in the historic coffee-room. His eyes seemed to be saying: "Sid Jenkin is at home anywhere."

Sam rose.

"Had your lunch?"

"I'm just going to have it," said Sam humorously.

"Take Mr. Jenkin's order, please," Sam said to the headwaiter, grasping Sid's rough hand. The other two men gave quick, interested glances at the pair; and Sid's eyes seemed to be saying: "Two of His Majesty's Ministers, one of 'em a lord, and the other plain, proletarian Sid Jenkin, lunching together."

"Sid, you've got a special knack of tracking me down," Sam said. He laughed, but he was beginning to be uneasy about Sid Jenkin, considered as a schemer. Nobody at the Ministry knew where Sam was lunching. Spies? Detectives? Sam smiled to himself at the richly comic thought.

"Ah!" drawled Sid, with a face of mystery. "You're a very great man now, Sam, and you can't 'ide your light under a bushel." Then he laughed and became confidential. "No! I'll tell you. I rang you up at the Ministry--"

"After I'd gone out--as usual."

"As usual. And they said you'd probably be at Christie's."

"The deuce they did!"

"Yes. The deuce they did."

"Very indiscreet of them."

"Perhaps. But they couldn't deny Sid Jenkin. I told 'em I'd got to get you--and quick. And quick they gave you away. Off I went to Christie's and found Geoffrey there. Never been in there before. Quite a place! 'E's looking better, Geoffrey is."

Sid had insisted on making the acquaintance of Geoffrey. Implicit in all Sid Jenkin's relations with and talk about Geoffrey was the extraordinary assumption that he, Sid, had somehow been the instrument of the lad's safe return to England. Instead of being apologetic to Sam for remissness and futility in the Geoffrey affair, Sid without saying a word took much credit for his actions; which annoyed Sam, especially as Geoffrey evidently liked and admired the illustrious tribune, whose attitude towards him was avuncular.

"Yes, I think he's better," Sam agreed.

"Well, Geoffrey didn't know where you'd gone, or if he knew he wouldn't say, the rascal. But I put two and two together. 'Christie's,' said I. 'Club,' said I. 'A hundred or two yards between 'em. 'E's at 'is Club,' said I. And I was not very far out, was I?"

The other two men at the table dropped napkins on to chairs and departed.

"About that question in the 'Ouse this afternoon?"

"But I gave you the full answer yesterday. There's nothing else for you to know."

It had been decided, with the approval of the War Cabinet, that questions in the Commons concerning the Ministry of Records should be answered by Sid. The arrangement suited Sam well, and he could find no fault with Sid's adroit, placatory, and indeed masterly methods of dealing with spoil-sports, cranks, and real enemies. Sam's own answers to one or two questions put in the House of Lords were not often on the same high plane of efficiency as Sid's.

"I know you gave me the full answer," said Sid Jenkin with a grin. "But I 'appened to be talking to the old man this morning--"

"What old man?"

"Andy--his worship--the lord god."

"Oh!"

"And 'e seemed a bit--not scared but wavering like, filmy--'filmy's' a good word--about any more commandeering."

"But he told me to do as I liked."

"When?"

"Last night. And I have an appointment with him this afternoon."

Sam spoke rather defiantly and suspiciously. Andy might be the Prime Minister, but he wasn't going to have any Prime Minister interfering in his department. His department was definitely a success. He, Sam, was beyond question a source of strength to the Government. The Government could not afford to cross him, and if the Government did try to cross him he would jolly quick present an ultimatum. Sam indeed, though he did not know it, was suffering ever so little from the disease known as folie des grandeurs.

"Well, lad, you won't see 'im this afternoon, because 'e's gone into the country--to think, 'e says."

"Who told you?"

"I saw 'im go with me own eyes?"

"But I was going to Downing Street straight from here."

"Yes, they told me at the Ministry you were to be there at three. But you needn't trouble, lad."

"He ought to have let me know."

"'E never lets anybody know--except Hogarth."

Sam had a qualm. He was thrown down from greatness. He saw nets being spread to entangle his stumbling feet. He saw crevasses, shifting surfaces of treacherous snow. Only last night he had been the boon companion of Andrew Clyth, and Miss Packer was soft sweetness itself. And now . . .! Who was against him? Who wanted his scalp? Had Andy developed jealousy of his creature? The mention of Tom Hogarth as being favoured beyond all others annoyed him and bade him be wary. No! He could not defy the entire War Cabinet. An ultimatum would be too dangerous. No doubt Sid Jenkin had been sent to give him pause, or perhaps to gather material for an attack on him. He must go slow. Supposing that he had actually gone to Downing Street full of easy confidence, and been turned away by the smooth butler with the information that the Prime Minister was out of town! What humiliation! What a blow in the face!

"When will the P.M. be back?"

"God knows. Perhaps the day after to-morrow."

"Well, I've got to see him about interviews with those damned overseas journalists. That's certain."

The overseas editors had begun to arrive. Those who had arrived were saying, and those who had not arrived were cabling, that they must positively see Andrew Clyth, Andrew Clyth, Andrew Clyth--that was the name on all their lips.

They everyone wanted to go back home boasting that they had had personal, private speech with Andrew Clyth. Nobody else mattered to them. Andrew was the greatest man in the world. Sam had already carried through several such interviews, and others had been decided on.

"'E's getting a bit fed up with your journalists," said Sid Jenkin. "Says 'e ain't going to see any more. Says 'e's got something else to do than waste his time listening to the gabble of a lot of prairie reporters. 'E's fretting, Andy is. I thought I'd tell ye."

"But what's he got to fret about? The war's going much better."

"It ain't the war as is troubling 'im. 'Is Man-Power Bill isn't panning out as 'e said it would. There's a lot of 'em getting at 'im about it. And 'e was obliged to ask the Privy Council to postpone conscription in Ireland. That made 'im wild, you bet. 'E don't want any more trouble along of all this commandeering of yours, my boy."

"Have I been absolutely blind?" Sam asked himself. "Are they all cleverer than I am? Am I only a beginner?" Sid Jenkin's tidings staggered him, by their revelation of the unimaginable duplicity of his boyhood's friend and enemy. Had then the value of old Mrs. Clyth's sponsorship dwindled to nothing?

They discussed a long time the precise form of Sid's answer to the afternoon's question in the House of Commons, and eventually it was transformed into something very different from what Sam had intended and originally laid down. Sid summoned a waitress.

"Get someone to order a taxi, will ye, miss. Say it's for Mr. Sid Jenkin." And to Sam: "I must shunt it." The tables were now all empty. And yet Sam had scarcely noticed anyone go. The roam was desolate. And Sam was desolate--and rebellious.

On his return to the Ministry of Records, at least an hour earlier than he was expected--indeed he had told the privileged individuals on the steps of his throne that he might not be back till late, if at all--Sam had the sensation of one who has been found out, who has something to hide, who must pretend to be what he no longer is. What a fall from his gay mood that day when he had cornered Afflock! His first impulse was to act the tyrant and, as it were, lay waste the entire hotel and spread terror from floor to floor. He rang, a lengthy, hard push on the little knob, for a secretary, and seemed to count the seconds till the summons was answered.

"Send General Slessing in to me at once, please," he commanded grimly.

The changed look on the secretary's face flattered the instinct for cruelty which sleeps in every man of authority. Sam took a special pleasure in giving orders to generals, no matter what kind of general they might be. In so doing he satisfied the popular prejudice, which he sometimes for fun allowed himself to share, against the whole tribe of red-tabs and brass-hats. General Slessing was a Colonial officer, over sixty years of age, whose rank was dear to its bearer because it enabled him to receive salutes from colonels and to hear at the end of every sentence the word so fraught with prestige "General." He was high up in the "Cables" department.

"General Slessing," announced the ministerial watch-dog and guardian of Sam's room.

"Yes, Raingo," said the tall, gaunt old man, striding lankily into the presence, and saw the watch-dog shut the door, and waited.

Suddenly, and apparently for no reason, Sam perceived that he was about to take the wrong tack. He recalled the wisdom of a modern philosopher: "Never show a wound." The very last thing he ought to do was to endanger further a damaged authority by using it roughly. Everybody would guess, if he gave wiggings contrary to his habit, that he had received one. No! He must be smooth, courteous, lenient, and even gay.

"Awfully good of you to come so quickly," he said, smiling and indicating a chair. "I hope I haven't taken you off anything very urgent; but I want you to keep an eye on the broadcasting message to-night. I expect you know more about feeling in the Antipodes than anybody else here--"

He continued, inventing when necessary as he went along.

The General smacked his lips over the honey not dreaming that Sam had it in mind to scourge him for trying to interfere in the composition of the nightly world-message. Sam knew that he might be laying up trouble for himself later, but he did not care; he could secretly appoint someone else to counter any possible foolishness on the part of the General. Then he rang again for the secretary.

"General Slessing has very kindly promised----" he began to the secretary, thus publishing the General's rise in favour. The General departed, very content.

"Yes, that's the tack," said Sam to himself. "What an ass I might have made of myself!"

He took a letter out of a drawer. It was from Mr. Eric Trumbull, the French "national," dated Grenoble and gave a clear, succinct and modestly triumphant account of Eric's activities in the way of forming Anglophile propagandist committees in Central France. Sam had been gradually coming to the conclusion that Anglophile propagandist committees in France were not worth the trouble they made; and further that Trumbull was too clever and reliable a man to permit to be absent from the Ministry. He could find more important work for Trumbull. The next minute he was composing in quiet tones to Miss Newman, the plump, bland stenographer, a letter which she stroked and dotted in her notebook as calmly as though it had been an order for stationery instead of a semi-imperial ukase destroying the elaborate plans of an exceptionally brilliant brain and changing the trend of an international policy. As the fair but lumpy young woman silently left the room, Sam thought how strange it was that such a great deed could be so simply and casually done.

"This amounts to a dictatorship," he thought. And somehow the incident threw light on the eternal enigma of the Prime Minister. Everyone had agreed that Andy had attained to the position of Dictator of the British Empire. Yet Sam had never heard him dictate, had never even heard him talk at length in private. The dictatorship was in the secret processes of Andy's energetic mind. He reflected; he hesitated; he gave play to his instincts. Then a laconic word, and the course of policy was thrust into a new direction, and there was nothing more to be said. This was power. The only difference, save the difference of degree, between Sam's method and Andy's was that Andy seldom read anything and never wrote anything.

The watch-dog entered. Sam looked up through the lighting of a cigarette.

"Can you see Lord Winton any time this afternoon, my lord?"

"Who the devil was Lord Winton? Ah, yes! Of course!"

"No."

"Very good, my lord."

The watch-dog entered again.

"A Mrs. Blacklow is on the telephone, my lord. Can she come to see you?"

"Ask Mrs. Blacklow to take a taxi and come at once. She didn't say what it was about?"

"No, my lord."

"Never mind."

"Very good, my lord."

He could not imagine how the expectant mother had found the courage to ask for an interview--he had not been to his office for days--but Mrs. Blacklow was his protégée, and therefore he could not deny her.

"I say, Stewart."

"Yes, my lord."

"Tell the hall porter that when she comes Mrs. Blacklow is to be shown up at once. And, Stewart, ask Captain Mayden to come to me."

"Very good, my lord."

Mayden was Sam's confidant at the Ministry.

"Mayden, my poor friend," said he, when the Secretary-General had limped in and gently deposited himself on the chair opposite to the throne at the great desk, "I want to talk to you."

But an instinct--pride, vanity, or prudence--prevented Sam from being completely candid even to Mayden, his pet and his pillar. He had meant to be completely candid, yet no sooner had he opened his mouth than he felt that such a course would be impossible to him. How could he tell Mayden that he, Sam, was in disgrace, that he had had a near escape of going to Downing Street with a definite appointment and being turned away with the news that the Prime Minister had left for the country? He could no more tell this to Mayden than to Timmerson himself. Nobody on earth could be permitted to share his secret humiliation.

Mayden watched smiling.

"It's like this. We can't keep on bothering the Prime Minister with these editor fellows from God knows where. It takes up too much of his time. We simply can't expect him to do it. There'll be about four hundred of them by the time they're all here. They all want to see him alone. Give 'em twenty minutes each. That's a hundred and thirty three hours--not counting the fitting in. You only have to look it in the face to see how absurd it is. He's seen six or eight--and I wish he hadn't."

"Has he been complaining?"

"Oh, no!" said Sam, as if shocked at the notion. "I was with him last night and he was most obliging. It's true that I've heard a rumour indirectly that he isn't absolutely mad on meeting the fellows; but it's up to us to protect him. After all, there's a war on, isn't there? The question is, how are we to protect him?"

"We've made a bad beginning, sir."

"That's it. We've made a bad beginning. We've established a precedent. You may bet that all those who have seen him have taken steps to inform the entire world of the fact. Of course he must see some of 'em."

"Yes. He'd better see the stupid ones. They must be sorted out."

"He must see the really big guns," said Sam firmly. "You and I'd better go through the list."

"I don't think the big guns matter a bit, as such," Mayden stuck to his point. "If they're intelligent and decent they'll understand--however big they are. If they're stupid and conceited they won't understand and they'll feel insulted and their cables home will be coloured accordingly."

"There's something in that," said Sam blandly, laughing. "But perhaps not as much as you think."

"Perhaps not, sir."

"No. You mustn't be too ingenious, my boy. It never works."

Mayden smiled wistfully and apologetically.

"We'll just mingle the very biggest guns--the fifteen-inchers--and the masterpieces of stupidity, and cut the number down as low as we can, and try that. The rest of 'em he can chat with at the banquet. I only hope he won't go out on strike before we get to the end of our list."

"If he does, we might turn them over to Mr. Sid Jenkin to handle."

"Jenkin won't satisfy any of 'em."

"Oh, no! I meant that he could take them to the Prime Minister."

Sam was hurt.

"D'ye mean he'd get 'em through?"

"I should say so, sir. The Prime Minister would never refuse him."

Mayden put so slight an emphasis on the "him" that Sam could not be quite sure whether he put on any emphasis at all. But Sam was disturbed at this frank, almost crude, suggestion from a valued ally that Sid could accomplish what he himself could not accomplish with Andy. It seemed plainly to indicate that Sam's position vis à vis the core of the Government was by no means what he had been thinking it was. The sense of his insecurity was increased. He had no thought now of marching straight on and defying the Government. He was extremely uneasy.

The watch-dog entered.

"Mrs. Blacklow is here, my lord."

"Well," said Sam. "We'll think it over. Come and talk to me about it to-morrow, will you? . . . Show Mrs. Blacklow in, Stewart."

Mrs. Blacklow presented her usual meek, shabby, mended appearance--well typified by her worn gloves--but she had lost much of her diffidence, and she was quite cheerful. He had noticed some change in her demeanour when she had met him under the portico of the Palace; the change was now more marked; certainly he had not before seen her so cheerful. There was no visible change in her figure. Sam responded to her mood and, to his own surprise, became cheerful also.

"Well, Mrs. Blacklow," he began. "Sit down and first of all tell me how you are."

"I'm very well indeed, thank you, my lord. I've never been so well in my life."

"That's fine," said Sam warmly. "You look well." He was full of benevolence towards his protégée, and it was his benevolence that made him happy. He waited for her disclosures.

"I thought I ought to tell you that Mr. Swetnam says I must leave on Saturday. It isn't that I mind, now you've been so good, and of course I can't blame Mr. Swetnam in any way, because he doesn't know what's happened to me. But I thought I ought to let you know, for fear you might come into the office one day and find me gone."

"Then you've not told him?"

"Oh no, my lord. I wouldn't tell him without your permission. I wouldn't tell anyone. I'm not afraid to tell him. I should like to tell him. Sometimes I feel I must tell him. I should like to tell everybody. I'm not a bit shy now. I think I'm rather proud, in fact."

"You're quite right. But if I were you I wouldn't tell Mr. Swetnam--yet."

"No, my lord. Very well, I won't. It's just as you think best."

Sam was moved, partly by her simplicity and partly by her absorption in the greatest experience of her life. She was not worrying about her future, or that of the child far from being born; she was not even to be cast down by the thought of having one day to meet her betrayed husband. She had forgotten the child's chance father. She was wrapped up in her supreme role and the marvels that were obscurely passing within her.

And also Sam was once again flattered by her trust in him.

She had only spoken to him a few times, and yet, quite easily and naturally, she opened her heart to him as she might have done to an aged, benignant priest. He admitted to himself humbly that he had never understood women and, now, that he never would do. He had never desired that Delphine should be a mother, but now he desired this. He had a most touching vision of Delphine, strong and massive, plenteously nursing his child. If from no other motive, he would marry Delphine, and all the world should see her in her growing physical splendour. His sensations before and after the birth of Geoffrey were but the pale precursors of what he imagined in that moment.

"There's no reason why you shouldn't stay on in my office another month, is there?"

"I think not, my lord."

"Does Mr. Swetnam know you've come to see me?"

"Oh no, my lord. He went off and left me to lock up. I didn't telephone you till he'd gone."

"That's all right, then. I'll speak to him. I may or may not tell him. If I do, he'll understand. He's very much of a family man, Swetnam is."

Miss Newman came in with some letters for signature, interrupting Mrs. Blacklow's reply. The Ministry was strangely functioning just as usual, regardless of the wondrous scene at the desk. When they were alone again, Sam said:

"Anything else?"

"Well, there was something else, my lord, and that's really why I came. I could have written the other."

Mrs. Blacklow then began to apologize for prospective temerity, and Sam encouraged her therein, somewhat impatiently. Of the two Sam was perhaps the more nervous, certainly the more apprehensive. She said in her weak, now pleasant voice, that on the previous night, travelling homewards in the Tube, she had sat next to two middle-aged military officers and had gathered from fragments of their talk that they worked at the War Office. One of them had opened an evening paper, and Mrs. Blacklow had just been able to distinguish on the front page a small portrait of Lord Raingo.

"Yes. That's right," said Sam. "There was one."

"One of the officers just showed it to the other. He didn't quite show it. He lifted it up so the other could see it. And he pulled a face, and the other one said, 'I wonder if he knows he's going to be done in.' He only grunted it, so you could scarcely hear what he was saying, but I did hear it, my lord. I heard it quite clearly."

Sam smiled, partly to Mrs. Blacklow and partly to himself.

"That all?"

"Yes. They never spoke another word--at least not while I was in the carriage."

"What grade were they?"

"The one nearest to me was a major. I couldn't see what the other one was." She went on, more eagerly and earnestly, without waiting for Sam to say anything: "I wanted to tell you, sir, because it was so queer. I thought I ought to tell you. Me being there next to them just then. I might have taken another train. I was a bit later than usual because I stopped to buy some oranges. And when they got in at Westminster Bridge there was just those two empty seats by us and no more. And it wasn't a smoking carriage either. I can't bear the smell of smoke now, and I never get into a smoking carriage; but officers almost always go smoking. And him unfolding his paper just then, and so that I could see it. No! I couldn't rest satisfied till I'd told you, my lord. It must have been meant for me. You can call it what you like, but it must have been meant for me. And it was a call for me to tell you. It couldn't be anything else. We can't understand these things. I know that. I'm not religious--well, I don't think I am, but I always believed in Providence, and who could help believing in Providence after that? That's what I say. And I hope you'll excuse me, my lord."

Sam had not the heart to reply: "Pure coincidence." He had not even the wish to say it, nor the conviction necessary to say it. Her implications were enormous. They influenced him despite himself. They shook his very sturdy rationalism. Who could deny that the universe was moved by mysterious forces of which men knew nothing--or were only just beginning to suspect the existence? Blessed are the meek. To the simple is given wisdom. Rationalism was as dogmatic as mysticism and superstition--must be, in the last resort.

The love of superstition which is dormant in the most rigidly rational was aroused in Sam. He was overset by the evident power and pure sincerity of Mrs. Blacklow's belief. He could even credit that because she was carrying a child special faculties were granted to her by Nature. How strange it was that while talking of these tremendous matters which transcended all common experience she should be mindful of ridiculously petty distinctions and address him as "my lord." Her lord! Good God!

"I'm much obliged to you for telling me," he said.

"Thank you, my lord. But that isn't all either. Oh, my lord, I hope you'll excuse me, but I couldn't go to sleep last night because my little one was uneasy. And I knew that was a sign too."

Sam felt constrained, and looked away. Surely she was going too far. But then women never had a genuine sense of decency.

After a pause, she went on:

"I take Gerald into the parks as often as I can."

"Who's Gerald?" Sam interrupted her.

"Why! My little one, sir. But if it's a girl she's Rose. Only I think it's a boy. I take him into the parks so we can smell the flowers. It's good for him. And we go to the Abbey too, and to St. Paul's. And we've even been to the national Gallery to see the Madonnas. But that was for me more than for him. He's always been a happy child. That's why I've been getting happier and happier. I'm so proud of him already. But he was very disturbed last night. I didn't notice it till I was in bed in the dark. Everything's been so harmonious for him, since I told you about him and you were so kind. But it wasn't harmonious any longer last night. I don't think he likes Tubes. I don't think they're good for him. And of course he'd felt all that I felt. He feels all the time. He felt last night that destruction was in the world. My brain was too active. He doesn't like my brain to be too active. He likes it better when I just feel--quietly. I said to myself I must control myself. I tried to soothe him all I could. I whispered the Lord's Prayer again, and again. And then I said 'One, two, buckle my shoe, three, four, shut the door.' That was more for him. And at last I got him soothed. That was when I saw that destruction would destroy itself. And when it's destroyed itself there's an empty place, and good creeps back again bit by bit into the empty place. So I feel it'll all be all right in the end, my lord. I'm easier in myself now I've told you. And so's he."

Sam could not speak. He was awed; there is no other word. And he was using this miraculous shabby creature, this fearless trafficker with the most secret forces of Nature, as a clerk. And Swetnam had told her she must leave his service on Saturday! He felt the full weight of her warning news, and the menace of his invisible enemies in Whitehall. But he was not daunted nor gloomy. He could not meet Mrs. Blacklow's quiet, assured smile and feel gloomy.

"The professor's broken out in a new place," said Timmerson, coming into Sam one morning with a marked newspaper in his hand. Timmerson's demeanour had a veneer of jauntiness covering apprehension. Sam did not notice this, or he willed to convince himself that he had not noticed it. Anyhow he never attached importance to Timmerson's demeanour, except in regard to matters which might affect his personal relations with Timmerson. Those relations he took much care to keep sweet, for though Timmerson might be a fool he was a well-established fool, and a breach, or even friction, between them would cause far more trouble than it could possibly be worth.

"The Professor" was the nickname given in the Ministry to the military writer who had been attacking the Government, and the Prime Minister in particular, in a Sunday paper, and whom Sam had promised Andy Clyth, on the memorable evening of Scotch broth, to deal with effectively. Sam, having nosed into the private affairs of Fleet Street experts in the art of war, had discovered another military writer of some weight, who had quarrelled with the Professor, and presently a short series of counterblasts to the Professor's stately diatribes was appearing in a morning sheet of vast circulation. Sam was rather proud of the results of this scheme; but his hope of some expression of appreciation from Andy had been disappointed. At their meetings Andy had said not a word about the soon notorious counterblasts, and Sam's pride would not allow him to angle for praise.

He now glanced preoccupied at the top of the page. The newspaper was the very one which at the beginning of his career as a Minister he had debauched by getting it to print the translated extracts of French Anglophobia.

"You've seen it, of course," Timmerson squeaked apologetically.

"No, I haven't," said Sam curtly. He noticed his own curtness, almost a presage of irritability, and instantly took stock of himself. His thoughts ran like lightning: "This means fatigue. I'm tired. I must watch my sleeping. Two nights I've had night-sweats. What does that mean? I haven't been to the doctor this week, either. I'm never irritable except when I'm tired. I don't feel tired--at least I don't think I do. But I must be. Am I overworking?"

He turned with a smile to the man of ample and starched1inen:

"Excuse me, my dear fellow. I wasn't thinking. What is it? Yes. I'll read that before lunch. Public's tired of it now, anyway. I'm glad you've come in. I wanted to explain to you about Trumbull. He's on his way home. But I'd like you to cable him to stop in Paris long enough to see the ambassador. We've got to square that fellow, and Trumbull's the man to handle him. Do you think so--or don't you? Tell me frankly."

Timmerson squeaked away; of late he had been squeaking more frequently. Sam longed for him to leave the room.

"If this chap doesn't clear out I shall have to chuck the paper-weight at him," thought Sam. His irritability was increasing, but he successfully hid it, and in the end dismissed this second-in-command in a mood of restored confidence in the goodness of God.

Since the visit of Mrs. Blacklow Sam had been on the whole blithe, despite the feeling of being surrounded, at a distance, by inimical machinations. Like a child he trusted Mrs. Blacklow's assurance that all would end well. It was very strange. Of course the staff of the Ministry had copied his attitude towards affairs. He really ruled the Ministry now. Gone was his affectation of being a simpleton who desired to learn and who believed everything he heard from his men. He was getting to be an autocrat, but an autocrat beloved. He was beloved because he contrived to be an elder brother to all, and because he was a success with the public, and because his schemes seemed to succeed; also because, after a terrific, frightening outburst, which Timmerson, Mayden and two secretaries had witnessed, he had cashiered a railway director whom the staff hated for his incompetence and meddlesome arrogance. That scene had given the keenest pleasure to everybody except the railway director. Four different versions of it, all highly coloured, were current within the building, and perhaps four and forty in the great world beyond. It had inspired Sam to permeate with his individuality every room in the hotel. And more than anything else it had helped to rid him of the exaggerated painful sense of responsibility which had disturbed his initiation into office. He could treat propaganda now as lightly as Andrew Clyth said he treated the entirety of the war.

He loved his work; he had developed a passion for it. He smacked his lips over conferences, press-audiences, press-lunches, minutes, finance, cables, broadcasting, films, intimate banquets for foreign nobs. And all these were nothing in his mind compared with his large comprehensive scheme for unifying every kind of propaganda under one roof and his own headship. Sid Jenkin's warning against commandeering had not deterred him--so much momentum had he acquired. And further, little by little, he was collecting knowledge about the war in general--the altercations between ministries, the more serious altercations between Allies, and the still more serious troubles between Britain and the Dominions.

Where he fell short was in the pursuit of close, familiar relations with important ministers, the men of paramount influence. His trouble lay in the absurdly limited number of hours constituting a day. He knew that here he was running a risk, and he was always trying to remedy the defect in his activities and never satisfactorily succeeding. Tom Hogarth he had scarcely seen; and his rare chats with the Prime Minister had been too friendly, too much on the Eccles plane, and not sufficiently significant in an official sense. Moreover he had scarcely set eyes upon the Prime Minister since Sid Jenkin's incursion into the Club. His extensive memoranda submitted to the War Cabinet were all duly answered by the secretariat, but the more recent replies had shown a certain tepid vagueness.

He looked at the clock, which showed a quarter to twelve. He had squandered nearly half an hour in undirected reflection. "There must be something the matter with me," he thought. At noon was appointed to take place the important weekly conference, at which he presided, of heads of sections and other important members of the staff in the big room in the basement. He had not a moment to spare, for his absolute punctuality on all occasions was famous throughout the building. Nevertheless, he felt that he must read the Professor's article. He was suddenly apprehensive about the article; it might need special attention.

He took up the paper which Timmerson had left for his august notice. As he studied it he wished that he had ignored it for a little longer--anyhow till after the conference; for it alarmed him and induced disorder in his mind, which he had tidied up for the conference. It amounted to a demolition of the rival expert, and put the Government in a worse plight than ever. It was written with authority and force--even with indignation, and it demonstrated that the Professor stood easily first among military experts in the press. Also it was brilliant and made fine reading. Perhaps the most annoying thing about it was its attack on the Prime Minister for an interfering, restless amateur. It would want some answering, if, indeed, it could be effectively answered at all. Sam wished to heaven that he had not so gratuitously and lightly offered to deal with the Professor. He imagined Andy's sensations on reading the accursed thing.

"Well, there it is, anyway. Damn it!" he ejaculated aloud, and rang the bell for secretaries.

In the next five minutes he gave one of his most dazzling displays of dispatch in transacting business, devolving all small points upon others, deciding larger ones in a moment, refusing to consider details, and spreading responsibility around.

"Give me the agenda of the conference," he said. "And my notes. Didn't I specially ask you to have a wider margin? I suppose I must speak to your typist myself."

Then another secretary ran in, like the bearer of supreme tidings on a battle-field.

"The Prime Minister on the telephone, my lord."

He hesitated.

"Put me through then, quick."

He took tip the receiver.

"Is that the Prime Minister?"

" Is that Lord Raingo?"

"Speaking."

"Kindly hold the line, my lord."

He held the line, he who always made other people hold the line! He held the line for more than a minute, tapping his foot. It seemed like a quarter of an hour.

"That Raingo?" came the telephone-transformed voice of Andy.

"Yes, sir."

The secretaries stood waiting by his side.

"I hate to trouble you, Sam, but could you come down to No. 10?"

"Now, Andy?" He said "Andy" for the benefit of the secretaries. A paltry ostentation of which he was immediately ashamed.

"Yes. If it isn't inconvenient. I want to consult you."

"Consult me?" he repeated. Another paltry ostentation. Somehow he could not renounce these effects.

"Yes. About one or two matters."

"I've got a rather important conference--just beginning."

"Ah! Then I mustn't trouble you." Andy's voice was that of a spoiled child.

"Oh, but I'll come, of course."

"Now?"

"Now. I'll be with you in less than ten minutes."

"You're very good, and I'm grateful."

"Not a bit. Not a bit. The reverse." Sam replaced the receiver violently.

Why had Andy chosen to telephone such a simple message himself? Well, you never knew why Andy did anything.

"Ask Sir Ernest to preside at the conference. Give him my notes and help him all you can. Get my car . . . Stewart!" he cried through the open door. "My hat."

A magnificent car stood at the door of No. 10. A watchful policeman raised his hand suddenly to stop Sam's car from approaching near enough to prevent the magnificent car from having to back in order to leave. Photographers stood about, shooting, and beyond the photographers a small crowd of gapers who had somehow forced the barrier at the end of the street. A very aged and rather diminutive spectacled lady was being helped into the car by the Prime Minister himself. Andy wore a morning coat, and his grey hair was brightly glistening in the sunshine and the ends of it waving in the breeze. The brakes of Sam's car squealed; the car halted with a shock, and Sam actively jumped down.

He recognized, across forty years, old Mrs. Clyth, Andy's mother. She had somehow changed; in particular she was much smaller than his memory of her; but substantially she was still identical with the mistress of the Clyth house at Eccles. As he stood waiting for attention he noticed the extraordinarily soft, delicate cheek which once as a child he had kissed. He was moved, as by the magic of some beautiful miracle. With what filial solicitude Andy took a hot-water bottle from the butler and stowed it under her honoured little feet, and then arranged the mohair rug and affectionately tucked it in.

The old lady glanced casually through her dark spectacles at Sam, but how could she be expected to see in the middle-aged, full-bodied man of importance the child, the schoolboy, or the hobbledehoy of Eccles?

Sam did not venture to intrude into the tableau. The cameras clicked again. A spectacle for the public: 'The Prime Minister sees his mother off from Downing Street for a drive in the park." The magnificent car swerved and vanished silently amid salutes into Whitehall. Andy turned and started, as if out of a dream.

"My dear fellow! Is it you? Why didn't you give a sign? My mother would have been delighted to see you again. Delighted! She'll be quite cross with me when I tell her she missed you by so little."

Sam said something modest and polite.

"Yes," he thought. "The old lady would have been delighted to see me again, and I should have liked to speak to her. But you saw me all right, and you didn't want me to speak to her. You were afraid that if I spoke to her she might have made a fuss of me, and it would have given me a standing you don't intend me to have." He felt "sneaped," as they used to say in Eccles. He divined that he was in disgrace, and began to examine and improve his defences.

"This is politics at their subtlest," he thought as, in front of the amiably chatting Andy, he went into the house.

They sat in the breakfast-room, and on the way thither saw not a soul except the butler.

"I've formed a partiality for this room," said Andy, sitting down in his own chair before a spent fire. "I can't keep out of it. I hate the drawing-rooms. I hate the Cabinet-room, and who wouldn't? Sit down, lad. Take a cigar." He spoke affably, but Sam, gloomy and resentful, believed that he was acting.

By the side of a cigar-box on the table behind the chair was a copy of the paper containing the Professor's article, Sam thoughtfully opened a cigar, saying to himself: "I may as well get this thing over at once."

"You've seen that article?" he began, jerking his head in the direction of the paper.

The Prime Minister nodded.

"Might have been better if we'd let that fellow alone," said he indifferently, showing his teeth in a determined smile, and looking warily at Sam, just as if Sam could not see him looking! Astonishing how the man could not resist so ingenuously watching his effects! "He's a bit too heavy metal for your chosen bruiser, Sam."

"It's not over yet," said Sam defiantly.

"I'm sure you've done your best--by the way, I suppose you didn't know this screed was going to appear?"

"How could I?"

"Oh, I don't know how, but some people do get to know things, and I thought you did. You remember you told me to leave it all to you, and so I dismissed it from my mind. It's only by dismissing from one's mind the things that are dismissible that one can carry on. You know that, Sammy, with all your experience. However, as I say, I'm sure you did your best and nobody can do more. And if there's some damage we must just stick it--that's all. Don't take it to heart, my lad. I won't try to influence you, but if you asked me my opinion I should say that it isn't worth bothering about any more. What's a newspaper article? We might go farther and fare still worse." He laughed again. "But do as you think best." Every phrase was, a condemnation, despite the always genial but continually varied tone.

Sam said to himself:

"He's fixed it so that he can blame me whatever happens. He's fearfully sick over it, and he had the paper put there on purpose. Damn him! He thinks he's talking to me like a father, and I'm the stupid boy. I wonder what sort of a mess the sublime Timmerson is making of my conference. I ought to be there, dominating everything, instead of puffing here at Andy's second-rate cigars and being lectured."

"Well," he said aloud, "it's very decent of you, Andy, to leave it to me. I'll think it over."

"That's quite all right," Andy reassured him. "I shouldn't have mentioned it if you hadn't. I think absolutely nothing of it, really. It wasn't in the least about that that I wanted to see you."

"Oh!" Sam cocked his ear.

"Of course not. I wanted to give you a hint that we've made an enemy."

"Who?"

"Afflock."

"You mean I've made an enemy."

"I say 'we' because we stand together. But I expect you did it. He didn't very much care for your attitude over his last demand for Secret Service money--so I hear."

"But I gave him his money without a word. Without a word."

"Well, apparently he was offended."

"Listen here, Andy," said Sam, sitting up. And he related fully the interview in which Afflock had had to withdraw his own order on Sam's telephone in Sam's presence.

The Prime Minister ought to have laughed at the predicament in which Sam had placed Afflock. But he did not. He gave a faint, insincere smile, and allowed Sam to see plainly that it was insincere. An infernally clever chap, thought Sam, and was much impressed by the skill in intercourse which Andy had acquired since the old crude days of Eccles. In those days Andy would have flown out and cursed Sam to hell, and given him ten good chances in five minutes. Now he enclosed himself in a sort of block-house, and there was nothing doing. He clearly conveyed his thoughts, his censure, his displeasure, while offering not one opening for an effective riposte.

"I gather there's going to be a question, or perhaps a motion, put in the House of Lords. All about you, my lad."

"What sort of a question?"

"Don't know. I thought you might be able to tell me. But you may bet it won't ostensibly deal with what they're objecting to."

"Who are 'they'?"

"War Office. Admiralty. F.O. War-Aims Committee. God knows what all!"

"But--"

"One moment. There are two matters. One is Secret Service. They all want control of their own Secret Service supplies. They all hate to have to come to a mushroom Ministry for that. The other is your scheme for getting into your own hands all propaganda."

"But--"

"One moment. We shall have to make some compromise,--give 'em something. Now I won't yield over Secret Service. I always said I wouldn't and I won't. I mean to keep my hold on that--through you. The centralization of propaganda is another matter."

"But my proposals have had your full approval--the approval of the War Cabinet."

"Not all the War Cabinet, and don't think it!" the Prime Minister smiled sardonically--a long smile. "Your scheme is perfectly logical. It means more efficiency. There's no answer to it--except human nature. I've got to keep the peace. Peace is better than efficiency. Half the gang is up--or will be up."

"You never mentioned it before."

"I didn't know of it. And even if I did know I expected you'd know more."

"I've been too busy to bother about intrigues."

"Doubtless! Doubtless!" The Prime Minister said naught else; but "doubtless" implied: "More fool you!"

Sam saw his centralization scheme shivered to bits and cast away. He wanted to show defiance and dared not, could not.

"And there's this," added the Prime Minister. "You've made yourself so popular. There's such a thing as being too popular. They're jealous of you."

"So are you," thought Sam. "I lay anything you're more jealous than anybody. And that's the explanation of the entire business."

The Prime Minister began to discuss in detail the coming affray in the House of Lords, which (he said) nothing could prevent and which threatened to develop into what is called a full-dress debate. They talked till the clock showed five minutes to one. Sam was lost in suppositions of attack and suppositions of defence. But his heart was full to overflowing with one terrible alarm, which, however, was utterly unconnected with the loss of his centralized scheme, or even the jealousy of his fellow-ministers, or even the possible loss of his office. He was indeed more frightened than he had ever been in his life.

The door opened.

"What is it?" the Prime Minister demanded sharply. Miss Packer stood in the doorway.

"I wouldn't let the servants come in. But I thought the fire ought to be seen to."

"Don't trouble. The fire's quite all right," said Sam. "And it's a warm day."

Miss Packer glanced at the expiring fire and smiled to herself, and came into the room. Sam jumped up and shook hands with her. Her demeanour was not quite as warm as the day. She made up the fire; smiled again, nodded, and left without another word.

"She's his boss anyhow," thought Sam.

Ten minutes later he departed, amid jolly, odious exclamations of mutual esteem and affection.

That evening, on the plea of indisposition and excessive fatigue, Lord Raingo asked Sir Ernest--the second request of the day--to take his place in the chair at a small dinner to a visiting deputation of neutrals. Sir Ernest, much flattered and still mildly glorying in his chairmanship of the conference in the morning, broke an engagement of his own in order to oblige! Sam's fatigue was not after all excessive, nor did he feel noticeably indisposed; but he had a most powerful desire, which he could not resist, to escape out of the world and repose himself on the soft cushion of Delphine's tenderness. His longing for solace was scarcely tolerable, and at any price of dereliction of duty had to be assuaged. He had not seen Delphine for several days and he wondered, apprehensively, whether she was keeping her resolution to have a meal prepared for him on the mere chance of his coming without previous notice. He might well have warned her, but had purposely refrained from doing so. From some obscure, naughty, inexcusable motive of jealousy he wanted to take her unawares. He had several of the maladies of love, and knew it not.

The meal was ready. Delphine was waiting in one of the absurd trifling aprons of her housewifery. There she stood in all her physical and emotional splendour, and greeted him with her quiet, enfolding love. She stole away his hat and coat. The lamps glowed. The table shone. The blinds and curtains were drawn, though night had not yet quite fallen. The small room had a faint, agreeable odour of stuffiness. The door was shut. Not a sound from the street. No war! No world! Only the haven of a room, and her tenderness! Sam's relief was intense. He could feel tears of relief in his eyes.

"Come here, child," he said in an uncertain, throaty voice, after she had kissed him and retreated nervously to verify the correctness of the table.

"Have you got a cold, darling Sam?" she asked with sudden anxiety.

"No," he answered. "Come here."

He was pulling a case from his hip-pocket. She came close to him, obedient, expectant, acquiescent--magnificent, massive, as tall as himself within half an inch. He clasped round her neck a superb jade necklace, which he had bought, at great cost, tempted by a shop-window, in the course of a circuitous reflecting stroll from Downing Street to his lunch.

He was happy in the gesture, in her large yet childlike pleasure, in the brilliance of the stones on her bosom. He would have had the moment endure for ever. He was ready to imitate the sublime, ignominious madness of a Boulanger or a Parnell, and eternally shame himself by abandoning all duty for passion. (No, not that; but nearly that.) She laughed with glee as she thanked him by word and deed and ran to the mirror.

Nervous now with delight, she excused herself and hurried through the bedroom into the little kitchen to begin the serving of the meal. He followed her, and back to the sitting-room, and back again to the kitchen, and finally to sit down opposite to her at the table. She did not remove her futile apron--sign of an increased, more delicious intimacy.

"I've had a knock, my dear," he said, and related the great episode of the morning. He told it in much detail, but rather jauntily. Even to her he could not boldly show a wound. And of his terrible alarm at the prospect of a full-dress debate in the House of Lords he said nothing, because he simply had not the courage to confess it. He must maintain his prestige in her sight. She listened. She understood. She grasped the situation, and the origins of it. He was pleased with her. She said:

"They've never forgiven you for refusing to touch your salary."

Here was a point which he had forgotten, and he appreciated her shrewd, realistic feminine perspicacity. How many women were her equal in political sense and the weighing of human motives? She was astonishing. Was she not astonishing? Then she said, indignantly:

"The truth is that politics is a trade union and you aren't in it. They'd sooner help their enemies that are in the game, than you."

She was more than astonishing; she was miraculous. In two sentences had she not summed up the basic psychological truth of the affair, more daringly, more bitterly and completely than he could have done it himself? He had always perceived that she had sagacity, and a sure feeling for the significance of things. Now she had proved it, now she surpassed herself.

His love for her flamed up even brighter and hotter than ever before. She was the only woman. None could match her. How right had been his first instinct in choosing her from all the other women in the world! How wrong his regrets that she was what is called a nonentity. She possessed the fundamentals; everything else could be acquired. He had wanted to admire her without reserve, and he admired her without reserve. He had a second and a lovelier, more intoxicating vision of her as the mistress of Moze Hall, playing with his child, his children, bearing more children, having learnt her profession of wife, mother, and hostess, speaking shrewdness to impressed, envying guests, adroit, modest, kindly, always furthering a political career which would extend for years beyond the end of the war.

He had made a mistake in not consulting her daily, at every turn of his work. He might never have been in his present mess if he had consulted her. (Fancy consulting poor Adela!) . . . However, she would now help him to save himself. She might show him the way to convey, without humiliation, to Timmerson, who had always opposed the great centralization scheme, the news that it would be abandoned. He thought, with rapture, and quite heedless of his troubles:

"I am terribly and finally in love with this girl. In all things she is absolutely necessary to me. I cannot do without her. I am the most fortunate of men. Millions of men would sell their souls to feel as I feel now."

It was true. But he wished to heaven he was slim, like the old man with the young creature at the Savoy that day at lunch. In her presence he was ashamed of his girth, which made him too old and unworthy to possess her physical magnificence. He hoped she would grow stout. No! Such a hope was base. She must remain for ever perfect, and he must put up as best he could with his size--which after all was perhaps not too marked!

"You're the goods, my dear," he began, a little nervously. "And I want to talk to you seriously."

She knew that he meant to praise her brief remarks on the situation, but she pretended not to understand, even while smiling her pleasure.

"Why!" she exclaimed. "What have I said now? You're teasing me, I suppose."

"You know quite well what I mean. Any woman as clever as you are must know just how clever she is. There's no such thing as unconscious common sense. I mean, you understand politics, and you know you do. And it's a very rare quality in women, believe me."

"Oh, Sam, I don't. I like to read about politics, because you're interested in them."

"That's true," said a voice within him. "She's only interested in them because I am. They're all alike, these passionate women are."

But he ignored the voice, and, leaning across the table, he put his hand playfully on her mouth to silence her.

"Mum-um-um-um," she affected playfully to talk through his hand. She was delighted by his unusual gesture, and the touch of his hand. She might have withdrawn her face, but she did not, pressing rather her mouth against his hand.

"Will you? Will you!" he menaced her. "Will you spill your gibberish all over me when I've told you I'm going to talk seriously to you?" She kissed his hand, and leaned back in her chair.

"One day," he said, "I don't mean now, but when the right time comes, we must get married."

"Sam!" she interrupted quickly and diffidently. "Not that! I couldn't. Me your wife!"

"I say," he continued masterfully, confidently, "when the right time comes we shall get married. You hear me--married."

"I--"

"Be quiet. Don't interrupt me, or I shall have to choke you, and I don't want to go to extremes. There'd be no end of a mess if I did. I'm having the house at Moze refurnished. Geoffrey's seeing to it for me. I dare say it'll cost twenty or thirty thousand: but as it's all old stuff he's buying it doesn't mean any diversion of labour--except of course for transport, and that's nothing. The war'll be over this year, bound to be--there's been a mutiny of German soldiers in Brussels, and I'm the only person that's heard of it here. And when the war is over I'll take another house in London, and I shall stick to politics and you'll help me. You'll be an absolutely ideal help for a politician--let's say statesman. Now don't infuriate me by telling me you aren't equal to it. You are equal to it. You'll have a thing or two to learn, but there are places where you can learn those. I assure you you're out of sight better than the wives of half the politicians I've met--out of sight. If you knew Mrs. Jenkin, for instance! My God! Oh! And lots more! You talk nicely. You know how to dress. You can keep your head. You're beautiful. You never want to do anything silly, or say anything silly either. Everybody would like you. And you understand. That's the point. Nine women out of every ten never even begin to understand. That's why the successful men in my new line of business simply leave their wives out of count. I shouldn't. I should count on you, and what's more I'm going to start in counting on you at once. We're going to talk politics a lot more than we have done in the past--a lot more, my child. You'll soon see how you'll get on."

He was pleased with the convincingness of his little speech. He saw his conception of the future complete. There was no flaw in it. She was the perfect figure to fit it. She had every quality. He adored her, but he saw her (he thought) with the most impartial detachment. Only his poetic creative fire was suddenly damped by the change in Delphine's face.

She stared at him with large, alarmed eyes; her full lower lip bulged and fell; tears ran down her lovely cheeks; her head sank into her hands; she sobbed.

He went round the table to her; but she was tragic; she pushed him away, and would not be comforted, nor cajoled, nor comforted. For her the crisis which he had in his ardour so swiftly precipitated was very grave; it was vital. He was terribly dashed; he did not know what to do with himself, whether to stay where he was or to move away. At length, crestfallen and lugubrious, pitched down from heaven into hell, he resumed his own chair, and absurdly feigned to eat.

"You mustn't ask me," said Delphine, controlling herself and looking at him courageously. "I will never do it. I sh'd be miserable and it would kill me. I know it would. I'm not that sort. I'm quite happy like this--except for the war--and I don't want anything else. Me the wife of a lord!" (How the phrase grated his susceptibility!) "Let me stay as I am, please, Sam. Please!"

She came to him and knelt at his feet abjectly, and raised her wet, imploring face. He could not bear to look at her, but to calm her he stroked her hair with a casual, patronizing band.

"Promise me, Sam, you'll let me alone."

"Very well," he murmured sadly, half disdainfully.

He had essayed one of his brilliant effects and failed. In three minutes a battle had been fought and lost, a dream shattered, a reed broken. Instead of being succoured, he must succour. Instead of receiving, he must give--give----give. He saw the truth as if for the first time, though he had seen it more than once before. She had every quality except that of ambition. She had no ambition at all, save to please him in her own way. Her temperament was not active but contemplative, and nothing could change it. He doubted not that he could by persistence persuade her to his will, but to do so would be worse than useless, for the cherished plan could never succeed. He saw that as clearly now as a few moments earlier he had seen a triumph for it. She had definitely forsaken the world for his arms. She could swoon into him and wear his necklaces with grace, even with majesty. No more!

Throughout their friendship she had constantly shown her limitations. She would not have a large flat. No, she would not. She had fought for a small home, a "nest." Damnable word! He well remembered how she had irritated him by her insistence on a ridiculous modesty of material environment. And he reflected that of late he had heard less and less of her canteen-work, and that the financial office, which had been her favourite toy for a space, was now fallen to a dressmaker's sewing-room.

He yielded. She had the invincible strength of the dreamer. She was far stronger than himself. She would never yield; could not. She would only pretend to yield. He immediately, characteristically, began to readjust his ideas for the future, his own future. Yes, she could only help him in her own way, and with that he must be content. He was as indissolubly attached to her as ever. And he must take her as she was, for he could not live without her. He knew it--and she knew it. He tried to piece the old happiness together again.

And then jealousy startlingly reappeared, stabbing him, piercing him. Causeless jealousy. But was it causeless? Why should she not marry him and take her rightful role? Not because she could not fulfil it, but because she would not. She desired to be free--for that mysterious man. She loved him, Sam, but she loved the other more: the other was young, of her own generation, and he, Sam, was old and fat. She was all goodness and affection; but she was capable of the deepest duplicity. Every woman was capable of duplicity.

She had returned to her chair now, weeping softly, and she sat wiping her eyes, and forlornly smiling (the smile of the victor, though)--and she was deceiving him. And when one night she had sunk into his lap as into a sofa and telephoned for him to the Berkeley Street flat--even then she had been deceiving him. But he was still hers, despite all her past, present and future deceptions, and would ever be. He, the popular minister, the great newspaper figure, the autocrat over hundreds--the conscious dupe of a typist girl! He hated her; he hated the jade necklace on her incomparable neck. He loved her. "This jealousy of mine is insane and disgusting," he said to himself.

"Oh, Sam," she whispered to him afterwards, with her arms tight round his neck as he sat in the easy chair. "If you wanted a mistress for your large houses, you ought to have chosen Gwen. She's the one. She isn't really timid, you know; she only seems timid. She's always wanting to do things, Gwen is. And when she was at Hanlopes, she did see some big houses I can tell you."

"Hanlopes? What Hanlopes? The Hanlopes?"

"I suppose so. Davies Street."

"Yes, that's it. You never told me she'd been at Hanlopes."

"Yes, she was. Sempstress. You know, fitting carpets and things. They turned her off and a lot more. The war's half ruined them. . . . Gwen's the one."

Extraordinary how they liked to belittle themselves in favour of another. They never meant it. More duplicity.

"How's Gwen getting on?"

"Oh, fair--she says. But I think they'll sack her at Kingston. Not enough business. The new boss is afraid. She's downstairs now."

"Downstairs now!" he exclaimed.

"At least she was when you came. I told her to do out the office--it was getting awfully dirty."

"But she hasn't had anything to eat, then!"

"Oh, yes, she has."

"How do you know?"

"I told her if she heard you come in she was to finish the room and then get a bite at Gaycock's opposite, and come back, and, if she didn't see you go, or I didn't come down and fetch her before nine o'clock, she could go home. She's gone by now I expect. Of course if you hadn't come she'd have eaten up here with me."

What a capacity for planning, for scheming--all carefully thought out! What duplicity! And how hard on the beautiful Gwen

As the evening passed Delphine dropped more and more into her exciting, pensive melancholia. Incomprehensible Well, perhaps it was the result of the shock which he had given her. He had to try to raise her out of it. She was very loving in her melancholia.

"Sam, you're very merry, but the famous burden of office is beginning to make its mark on your boyish eyes," said Tom Hogarth, with a jolly, half-brutal laugh; his broad shoulders shook.

"I wonder what you'd look like if you had to organize an overseas press visit to this city, with no help from any of your fellow-ministers," Sam replied lightly. "No, Sid," he added, turning to Jenkin, "I mustn't forget you. Sid does help me. He wangles interviews for my editors with the P.M. I'm damned if I can get 'em myself. But nobody else helps me. Not that I care! But I may tell you, Tommy, that munitions is nothing compared to my job."

"I'll swop with you," said Tom Hogarth challengingly.

"So will I," said the gloomy Hasper Clews, sardonic and kindly, Chancellor of the Exchequer.

The four were assembled in Sam's opulent, lofty sitting-room on the river front of the Savoy. The low roar of County Council trams came faintly up from the Embankment through the open window. The room was full of the preliminaries to dinner given regardless of cost and perhaps somewhat regardless of the rules of the Food Controller. A high priest in the guise of a specially chosen maître d'hôtel, and his acolytes, showed by their important and hushed demeanour a consciousness of being in the presence of the very great.

Sam, Tom Hogarth and Sid Jenkin were drinking cocktails. Of late Sam had discovered the tonic value of a cocktail. Hasper Clews, abstinent, was unwrapping at the table a paper containing his indispensable starchless bread. The other three had each a second cocktail. Sam was undoubtedly gay--and he was dominant. He had had, and was still having, difficult hours; he was still menaced; but what a difference, for him, between the atmosphere of this assemblage and that of the lunch at Downing Street which he had attended in order to be vetted by these same men. He had surpassed them all in the affections and gossip of the people, and they knew it, and that was perhaps the most significant fact for all of them in the situation.

The dinner was a sudden growth. In the morning the Prime Minister had rung up Sam to say that he would like to see him. Sam had instantly suggested the dinner, and the Prime Minister had surprised him by an amiable acceptance--through the lips of Rosie Packer. Sam had had the idea of reuniting the luncheon-party, but the Colonial Premier was out of England on a mission, and the Earl of Ockleford had declined, most urbanely, on the plea of a previous engagement. "Never mind," Sam had said to himself, "I shall be the only peer at the table."

It was a quarter to nine; the dinner was fixed for eight-thirty; they were waiting for the Prime Minister. At five minutes to nine Sam telephoned to Downing Street. The next moment he said to the high priest:

"We'll begin, please." And to his guests: "This dinner seems to be proceeding quite according to custom. Andy can't come. Prevented at the last moment, Miss Packer says. Says she's been trying to get me for the last twenty minutes. I wonder." He maintained his gaiety, which indeed not even the rebuff could overset.

Hasper Clews glanced at him with sad, humorous eyes.

"Prefers a quiet evening--dictating, oh yes, dictating," Tom Hogarth murmured, in a voice too low for the waiters to hear. He gave a soundless laugh, letting his head sink into his shoulders.

"I saw 'im at seven. Said 'e was coming then," said Sid Jenkin.

They sat down, and the meal began. All, except Hasper Clews, ate quickly--partly from war-habit and partly because, unconsciously, they wanted to get the waiters out of the room in order to be able to talk freely. And Clews, the most deliberate masticator in the Government, ate so little that he could easily keep pace with the rest.

"How's the French getting on, Hasper?" asked Tom teasingly.

"Est-ce que ça vous regarde?" Clews retorted.

"Oho!" cried Tom, while Sid Jenkin tried to look as though an ignorance of French was to his credit as a proletarian.

Gaiety persisted. They were no longer ministers, but boys giving their brains some well-earned repose and indulging in a crude general rag. The champagne helped. Clews drank nothing, but he managed to be unusually cheerful. The fact was that the progress of the war helped more than the vine.

"When's your show coming off in the House of Lords, Sam?" Tom Hogarth questioned.

"I expect you know better than I do," said Sam.

They glanced at one another, playful and yet dangerous, like two tigers not quite sure of their mood. The implications of Sam's retort were plainly horrid.

"I'll tell you the minute I do happen to know," said Tom. "I hear the attack is to be personal. I wouldn't conceal anything from you, my dear; and I tell you frankly I hear it is to be very personal." He sniggered happily, quaffing champagne.

"Who told you?"

"Oh! It's about. Nobody in particular."

"Don't you let 'em rattle you, Raingo," said Hasper Clews. "They're keeping you on tenterhooks day after day in the hope of getting you rattled. They're relying on upsetting your nerves before they start."

"I know that," said Sam evenly. And he did know it. "I'm expecting the blow in the next day or two. I think it's about that that Andy wants to see me. If so, Andy's expecting it too, and he'd know."

Apparently there was no attempt to disguise the fact that the Cabinet, or at any rate part of it, was divided between the desire to preserve the full prestige of the Government and the desire to see Sam in a mess of his own, and that on the whole the latter desire prevailed over the former.

"It's my damned popularity you hate," said Sam with the utmost geniality.

And not even that astounding remark could mar the jolly atmosphere. Clews shot at the host a sympathetic and admiring look, which Sam appreciated, and repaid with a glance of thanks.

"And now I've got something to tell you," said Sam the moment the waiters had gone, leaving the old cognac, the coffee and the cigars. "There's been a mutiny of German soldiers at Brussels." He gazed around.

"Oh rats!" exclaimed Tom. "I've heard that before."

"You've never heard of this mutiny before, my boy," said Sam. "I heard of it a fortnight ago and I've not mentioned it to a soul"--(he was forgetting Delphine)--"I wanted to make quite sure about it, and I've made quite sure."

"And 'ow did ye get 'old of it, Sammy?" asked Sid Jenkin.

"A Pole--"

"Aha! The usual Pole!" Tom Hogarth shouted, spluttering in malicious glee. "Sam, I'm surprised at you. What's his name? Phillipowski, no doubt, or something like that."

"I don't know his name. I only know what he calls himself. Noganski. He's probably forgotten his real name long ago. But if that fellow hasn't told me the truth I'll eat Tommy's swelled head. They seized the ringleaders pretty quick and lined 'em up to be shot, but the soldiers wouldn't shoot. Then they covered 'em up with sheets or something, marched off the firing-party and got a fresh one--and gave a fresh order to fire. But there was still no shooting. Then they bundled 'em all back to prison again, mutineers and non-shooters together."

"And then?"

"I don't know any more. But you can see for yourselves what a thing like that must mean," Sam finished exultantly.

"I suppose your Pole saw it all himself?" said Tom.

"He didn't see it. But he was in Brussels, and you may take it from me it happened all right. I only finished my inquiry this afternoon."

Sid Jenkin and Hasper Clews were impressed by Sam's air of strong conviction; but Tom Hogarth and his champagne and cognac obstinately and pugnaciously took another view. Tom had been doing fifty per cent. of the talking throughout the dinner, and his percentage now rose to ninety or ninety-five.

"Just listen to me," he said, "and I'll put you wise about German mutinies in Brussels."

He was lively with wine, but still master of all his renowned dialectical skill, of which he at once opened a marvellous display, reinforced by his extraordinary detailed knowledge of every aspect of the war. Sam sat back, and Sid Jenkin and Clews sat back, until Tom Hogarth had talked himself out, whereupon Tom poured out another glass of cognac.

"Don't drink it, Tom," said Sam, taking a fresh cigar.

"You're a nice sort of a kind of a host. Why not?"

"Because if you drink another drop you'll be drunk."

Tom sprang up, overturning the brandy bottle, whose fall knocked over two glasses. The sound of broken glass and the spectacle of precious ancient cognac making a pool on the cloth seemed to bring the night to a dramatic climax. Sam did not move.

"I'm going to get the P.M. to see my Pole himself to-morrow," he said quietly.

Tom hesitated, and sank into his chair. Then the thin, insinuating ting-ting of the telephone bell was heard in the stillness of the room.

"Andy wants me to go down to him at once," said Sam, having visited the instrument. Hasper Clews leaned across the table and saved the poor remainder of the cognac.

Sam found the Prime Minister once more in his favourite room, not in evening dress, but wearing the favourite velvet coat. His silver hair was spectacularly disarranged. He sat in his own special chair, huddled over some despatches, nervously settling his gold-rimmed eyeglasses as he frowningly and eagerly read. Mr. Poppleham, M.P., and Miss Packer stood with solemnity about him.

"Was this effective tableau arranged for my benefit?" Sam asked himself as he entered.

"Hello, Sam!" said the Prime Minister, looking up casually for half a second and then bending again to the page. "Sit down, will ye?"

Miss Packer gravely shook hands; Mr. Poppleham, being farther off, only nodded--but deferentially. Sam sat. Not a sound in the room, save the rustle of a turned page, and the stir of coal in a fire which had just been lighted.

"Well, what of it?" Andy cried suddenly, and as it were reproachfully, to Mr. Poppleham, pitching the despatch on to the table. "This news might be ten times worse than it is and there'd be no need for us to get excited. It's only this spring that we've had the first real test of our grit. We've got to take the general curve, not tear our hair over every little down and up. We must whip 'em, and we shall whip 'em, till they're unconscious. Labour's ready to stick it anyway. And from the bit of a kick-up in the House this afternoon, it doesn't seem as if people are very anxious to change me for anybody else just yet, eh?"

Miss Packer gave a serene, confident smile.

"Poppleham, telephone to Sir Rupert Afflock to come along here at eleven-thirty to-night."

"Yes, sir."

"Thank you, Miss Packer. D'ye mind passing me the remains of my broth before you go?" Andy was showing his teeth; his yellow eyes roved defiantly; his voice rasped; he ran one hand through the tangle of his hair. Sam did not know what had happened; he had never been told anything really secret or interesting, and he was to be told nothing now. But he gathered that somebody had been disturbed by the course of events at the Front, and that the dictator in Andy was tigerishly functioning. Authority, masterful and overbearing, seemed to exude from Andy's person, and Sam himself felt small, nearly as small as Mr. Poppleham and Miss Packer.

"No!" The Prime Minister repeated, casting a swift, covert glance at Sam. "They don't want anybody else but me yet." His tone was truculent, challenging, utterly intrepid--the tone of the man who had overruled commanders-in-chief in matters of military strategy and who stood by his decisions.

Sam thought:

"I have caught him in the very act of winning the war by will-power."

He both admired and feared Andy. Strange: all the food that Sam had eaten, and all the alcohol that he had drunk, were suddenly and completely digested.

"Sorry I couldn't turn up to-night, Sam," said Andy apologetically, when they were alone. No explanation vouchsafed. Andy did not furnish explanations, unless it might be the wrong ones. He was putting the spoon into the basin.

"No!" he exclaimed impishly. "You needn't look at it like that, my son. There isn't going to be any broth for you to-night." The Irish poet in Andy was speaking.

Sam laughed heartily, and Andy smiled with friendly roguery; but both felt the significance of the symbol.

"Well, how did the dinner go off?" said Andy lightly.

Sam was about to reply that the dinner had been great, but he checked himself.

"We missed you."

"I only wanted to tell you, Sam, I picked up a bit of gossip this morning, and I think there's something in it. They're going to tackle you in the Lords about your failure to counteract pacifist propaganda in the country. Alleged failure, I should say. Alleged failure. They're late of course. They always are. If they'd begun to make a fuss before the German push started they might have had something to talk about, but the push did for the Germans because it practically killed pacifism in this country. However, that's nothing. It's your head they're after, Sam. Pacifist propaganda's as good a pretext as any other. They don't want the fall of the Government--naturally. Only yours."

"Yes," said Sam. "I've heard it's going to be personal."

"And don't count too much on your press--on that press of yours, my boy. You've nobbled the working journalists all right, and even the editors. But the press-lords will have the last word, and they have their own axes to grind. Don't I know it! You might find the whole popular press change in a night. The press-lords only support popular favourites as long as it suits 'em to support 'em."

"We shall see about that, my big Andy," thought Sam. "Anyhow, you aren't the only person now that makes people nudge each other when they catch sight of him in a restaurant or in the street. And I've crowded you off the front-page quite a lot of times. And that's what's the matter with the joint of your nose." Aloud he said, smoothly: "The press-lords are your affair more than mine. I don't meddle with them. What interests me is the members of your Government who are engineering this push against me."

Andy laughed loud, his Scotch laugh; and he said nothing.

"Yes," Sam continued, still more smoothly. "Master Afflock, Bart., in particular. Perhaps I know a bit more than people think I know." (He did not.)

"I told you at the start I should stand by you," said Andy. "And--"

"No, you didn't." Sam stopped him. "You said I might find myself in a position where I should have to fight against you--and win."

"But I have stood by you."

"Oh, I know you have. Please don't imagine I think anything else." His tone was soothing and trustful. "You liar!" he said to himself. And aloud again: "I'll just explain to you the line I mean to take."

"No, you won't!" Andy cried. "You must talk to Ockleford--at any rate you must talk to Ockleford first. I've got myself into quite enough trouble with Ockleford as it is." Sam did not understand the allusion. "Ockleford's the leader in your House, and it's him you've got to settle things with. You can talk to me afterwards if you like--if we get a chance. I'm quite easy about you. I know you aren't the man to go and make yourself ridiculous."

"All which means," Sam addressed Andy in his heart, "you're taking me for a simpleton. The idea of you wanting to stifle a purely private conversation out of regard for Ockleford and the etiquette of the House! All you want is to sit on the fence till the thing's over. Then you'll drop down on the comfortable side. You aren't at all sure I shan't make a fool of myself. You know I'm not a good speaker. If I were you'd be all over me. If I'm ridiculous you'll drop me like a hot coal." His tongue merely said: "Of course! Of course! I wasn't thinking. I'll see Ockleford." And to himself: "I won't say another word to you about it. Nor to Ockleford either--unless he comes and asks me."

"There's just one thing," Sam resumed, "and it's rather important." He related in detail the Pole's circumstantial story of the mutiny in Brussels.

The Prime Minister listened intently at first and then grew restless.

"Very interesting," he said casually at the end. "I want you to see the man yourself."

"Oh, no! No need to do that. If you're satisfied."

"But I should like you to see him. I think you'd be convinced. I'm pretty sure you would."

"If you're convinced, that's enough for me. I quite appreciate the importance of it. Quite! You'll send along a chit of course in the usual way."

Sam persisted, and they argued for some time, Andy making it more and more clear that he entirely disbelieved the tale.

"Well, we'll see," said Andy at length, rather patronizingly. "I haven't got a moment to-morrow----or the next day." He rose and smiled benignantly. "I needn't tell you I have to ration myself. I'm going to send you in an account of the hours I've spent on your world-journalists, my lad--and especially on your Canadians. It was nice of you to drop in. I'm awfully sorry about the dinner."

In the hall Sam came upon Tom Hogarth, Sid Jenkin, and Sir Rupert Afflock, laughing and murmuring together, as thick as thieves. He chatted lightly with them for a minute, in the most colloquial and intimate manner, grinning appreciatively at one of Sid's stories.

No butler had appeared. Sam dismissed his car, and walked home along the Embankment, deserted even by the homeless. Only a few dimmed motor-cars and trams redeemed the thoroughfares from perfect darkness. The river and the bridges were nearly invisible.

"Andy can't help it," thought he, ruminating on the interview. "He's got human nature to deal with, including his own. I had a silly, footling idea that a world-war would change human nature. For all human nature cares a world-war is just like company-promoting. And my human nature's not better than theirs. He might, if he'd had time and if his human nature would have let him--he might have put me through an intensive inside course of politics, but he's more important things to think about. And I couldn't learn politics in three months more or less--nobody could. I've got to do the best I can and avoid moral indignation, and go through with it. We shall see what we shall see, Andy."

"Good evening, my lord," said the porter at the Embankment doors of the hotel.

"I'm a peer till I die, anyhow, and you can't alter that, Andy," said the human nature in the Minister of Records as he returned the porter's greeting. His heart was grim, sardonic, and yet kindly; subdued and yet purposeful. He wondered if Delphine was asleep.

When Sam entered the Upper Chamber on the afternoon of the anti-Raingo motion his self-consciousness and his stage-fright were intense. He walked to his seat with the quasi-military carriage which he always by instinct adopted on important occasions, but he was incapable of a single natural gesture. Neither his wealth nor his popularity was of the least service to him in the ordeal. He dared not look at the benches, and yet he could not help looking at them. The House was small, and the attitude of the few members present, as he felt rather than saw, frigidly civil. He held himself with the constraint of one upon whom all eyes are set--and set with hostility; nevertheless the detached witness in him knew that the eyes of most members were avoiding him, partly from an affectation of indifference and partly out of a decent desire not to incommode him,--for the House undoubtedly had manners; he was convinced also that the hostility would be tempered by a highly developed sense of fair play.

"Am I very pale?" he asked himself.

He was ashamed to think that he should be pale in the presence of these titled nonentities. What was their power to whiten his cheeks and constrict his throat? He scorned them, but in their collectivity they still overfaced him. He was dressed in mourning, with, however, a black-and-white check bow tie. He wished now that he had confined himself to strict black. Adela's death had deprived him of the celebrated blue-and-white neck-tie; but after a few weeks something had compelled him to imitate the blue-and-white in black-and-white (as first used for the sittings to photographers)--he could not forgo his label by which the world was used to recognize him; it would have been better, he now surmised, to return to plain black for the solemnity of this starched afternoon; unfortunately he had had no one to consult on the delicate point. Still, what could a necktie matter? But a necktie did matter--to himself.

"Why was I such a fool?"

As he sat down he had the illusion that the entire House was criticizing the taste of the mushroom minister who so soon after his wife's death could attend a debate with white in his necktie; if one member turned murmuring to another the murmur was surely about the offensiveness of his necktie. He had encountered Sid Jenkin in the precincts. Sid had evidently been told off to report to Andy upon Sam's performance. Sid was most friendly and encouraging, without any note of patronage towards a tyro; but he had given Sam a queer look before speaking: was the look an animadversion upon the necktie? And so on. Then Sam completely forgot his necktie and never thought of it again.

The House was discussing a local Electrical Power Bill. The speeches were brief, conversational, and not perfunctory. Members seemed to be saying: "This affair is a trifle, but let us be just and conscientious towards it." Sam wished that the debate would end; he wished also that it would last for ever.

He glanced around, trying to copy in his demeanour the urbane boredom of the rest of the House. He watched the Lord Chancellor, who with little movements of the head over a motionless body simulated a grave interest in Electrical Power. The officials were gloomily bored, gazing back in their hearts upon a past, and forward at a future, of ennui. But they were proud of their posts, too, in the august assembly.

There was Lord Lingham, whom Sam would have to answer; an old man, hero of agriculture and hunting-fields, with a kindly, courtly, honest face. The opposition could have selected no better spokesman for their purpose; for he was respected, utterly sincere, not a fool, and could be relied upon not to weary and annoy the House by any exhibition of undue Intelligence. Sam scarcely knew him, scarcely even recognized him, but he had recently learned enough of Lord Lingham to know that his previous estimate of him, formed during years of hearsay in the Commons, as a violently prejudiced and foolish reactionary partisan, had been grossly unfair to the noble viscount.

Lord Ockleford, leader of the House, entered, with due ceremony, but in a sort of gravely apologetic haste. He sat down by Sam and gave him a stately, courteous smile, whose perfection was the fruit of as many generations as the perfection of a lawn in an Oxford College. The electrical debate stood adjourned. Sam nerved himself for the assault. But two other Electrical Bills came up for a third reading, and Sam was reprieved. The third readings were accomplished in the winking of an eye.

Lord Lingham gathered together his aged, athletic limbs, stood up, and cleared his throat. He was untidy and ungainly, but what a style he had, what natural distinction of tone and deportment! What a contrast to Eccles--and Sam could feel "Eccles" written all over himself. The motion to which the noble viscount spoke was thus conceived: "That this House regrets that stronger measures have not been taken to combat the various agencies in this country which are serving the interests of the enemy."

Lord Lingham spoke with the ease of an old and honoured man who had made thousands of speeches in all sorts of conditions--and never one really good and never one really bad. He had the ideal combination of qualities for consistent success in British politics--character, mediocrity, and a hale commonsense. He spoke of the British Empire having its back to the wall with as much emotion and sincerity as though the phrase had never been used before. It was as if he actually felt the wall behind his own back and saw the horde of enemies in front, and as if he was grimly and pugnaciously enjoying the desperate situation, secure in the absolute conviction that he never had been beaten and never could be beaten. He was not bitter, even against pacifists, but he condemned them and thought strongly that they ought to be silenced, and that since mild measures had not sufficed for this purpose severe measures should be employed.

What he feared more than anything was a peace by negotiation. He did not say, but he implied, that if the positions had been changed and it was the enemy that had its back to the wall, he might have been willing to negotiate, but as things actually were any negotiation would be a shame and an everlasting disgrace. He ended with a warm appeal to the Government to be more active in safeguarding the country against mischievous groupings, coupling this with the assertion, which he challenged anyone to deny, that the great heart of the people beat true. Only one thought made him angry--namely, the thought that, in the midst of a paper famine, seditious sheets were allowed to buy paper while Government propaganda was hampered by the lack of paper. That this should be so was, he confessed, an insoluble puzzle to his simple intelligence. (Cheers.) The speech contained no personalities and showed no rancour.

Then up rose the breezy and gallant retired general who was to second the motion. Lord Garsington was nearly eighty and always the youngest man in any company in which he found himself. He was the chief orator and stand-by of the peace-at-no-price party, and his position with the country was tremendously fortified by the fact, which he did not cease to proclaim, that all his pre-war warnings had come true. If Lord Lingham had made thousands of speeches, General Lord Garsington had made tens of thousands, and to make them he had travelled--it was computed--three times the distance between the earth and the moon. He had never had a day's illness in his life, and never had a tooth out. He would say whatever came into his head, and justify this breeziness by the plea that he was a soldier and a plain-spoken man. His friendships were steadfast and everybody liked him, though his jokes were outrageous and he would sacrifice anything and anybody to get them out.

But to-day his mood was far from jocular. He was simply appalled by the lethargy of the Government. He was simply appalled by the gullibility of the working-classes (who nevertheless, he admitted, made the finest infantry in the world and in the history of the world, and whose great heart, he agreed with the noble viscount who had preceded him, beat true). He wanted to know, he insisted on being informed, where the pacifist organizations got their money from; and if no one could tell him he was prepared to tell everyone that in his opinion the pacifist organizations got their money from Germany. He attributed the failure of propaganda throughout the country and elsewhere to a lamentable tendency on the part of the Government towards over-centralization. The fighting services were not allowed to do their own work in this connection, or at best they were hampered in the doing of it, by departments which, however excellent in intention, were without tradition and actuated by a spirit foreign to the British spirit,--the spirit of the fighting services. He employed the phrase "fighting services" several times, and by the emotional emphasis which he put upon it showed plainly the origin of the inspiration which now vitalized his attack. He warned the Government--he whose warnings had never once yet been falsified by events. . . . He suddenly sat down, amid cheers which would have been called tepid in the Commons, but were deemed enthusiastic in the Lords.

Sam was horribly taken aback by the suddenness of Lord Garsington's down-sitting, for he had been expecting the noble and gallant lord to continue for quite another ten minutes. Scores of discreet and desperate thoughts ran through his mind. About his insomnia. About his night-sweats. The carefully composed sentences of his exordium, which he had learned by heart and repeated, with various intonations and stresses, in his room at the hotel and on the Embankment at early morn. Why Delphine was not in when he called to see her. The artful malice which had caused "them" (the real originators of the debate) to select the very day of his great press-banquet for the day of the debate. His own proud foolishness in not asking for another day. His own rash foolishness in telling Andy, on the afternoon when Andy gave him the ministerial appointment, all his ideas about Andy's motives in wishing to keep him out of the Lords. There had been no personalities after all. Why grown men--barons, viscounts, earls, marquises and even a duke--should applaud such an ingenuous speech as Garsington's. Where could Delphine have been when he called to see her and found the flat empty? Not that he was jealous. No. Jealousy had gone from him. He had not heard from her, but he had written to her while driving in the car. No chance, in the great rush, to telephone to her. His heart. Eric Trumbull's demeanour to him on his return from France. . .

He felt the Lord Chancellor's gaze upon him, and a certain expectant uneasiness in Lord Ockleford's posture by his side--and he saw that the House had considerably filled up, not only with members, but with spectators. More were now coming in. Excitement was in the air of the usually somnolent chamber. If not quite a full-dress debate, the affair was rather like one. This was practically his maiden speech.

"Well," he thought, "I'm up. My back is to the wall. I wonder what sort of a hell of a mess I shall make of it all. I wonder how I shall be feeling half an hour hence."

He fixed his eyes on Lord Lingham, as upon a comforting phenomenon of decency. Every gaze was upon him. He was alone and naked in infinite cold space.

"Can I say the first word?" he thought.

Ages passed. Well, he could not keep them waiting for ever. Why had he ever entered politics? No reward could compensate for his racking torture. He began with calculated humility by apologizing for his inexperience as a Minister and for a natural nervousness at addressing at length for the first time their lordships' historic and august Chamber. He heard his own voice. Was it quite like his own? He was suddenly conscious, with terror, of hidden reporters taking down, pitilessly, every phrase he uttered. Once said, no word could be altered, improved, destroyed. Each sentence was unchangeably there for ever. A frightening thought! He regretted the word "august." It laid on flattery with a trowel. "Historic" would have sufficed alone. But there "august" was, fixed certainly in Hansard and probably in The Times! Apart from that, he had made a good start; he could feel that he had impressed the House favourably.

He generously praised Lord Lingham for the sincerity of his patriotism and Lord Garsington for the effectiveness of his oratory in propaganda. Then he smiled contemptuously at pacifism. He related how a pacifist in a large northern munition works had been thrashed into hospital by angry fellow-workers. He deplored violence, nobody could deplore violence more then he did; but the incident showed that the citizens could deal with pacifism unaided by Government departments, and that pacifism was indeed scarcely worth official notice. As for the pacifist press, it was, Britain being a free country and the war being a fight for liberty, surely entitled to a fair share of that scarce commodity, paper--so long as it did not transgress the law. If it transgressed the law, then the matter was one for the police (Hear, hear!), not for the Ministry over which he had the honour to preside. He then, without a note and entirely from memory, gave a long series of colossal figures to show what the Ministry of Records had done in the way of circulating literature under his gifted and regretted predecessor and also under himself. The closely listening House was still more favourably impressed. He was doing very well. He saw the safety of the shore; which was getting nearer, and he was swimming strongly.

Turning to the charges of over-centralization made by the noble and gallant lord, he denied them completely. "The noble and gallant member for the fighting service"--A mistake! A horrible mistake! A double and a triple gaffe! Sam's occasional Puck-like humour had surprised and got the better of him. Also his tone was wrong; the spirit of defiance which now and then would stand up audaciously to the most formidable opponents rang now in his voice. No! He was not a good public speaker, because he could not depend on his apparatus.

He at once felt the House react against his ill-timed pleasantry. The atmosphere was changed, and the change grew more marked. Friendliness became indifference, resentment or hostility. Why had he been such a fool? There it was. The words were irrevocably and ineffaceably down in the notebooks of the reporters; nothing could draw them back. He longed to be able to fade away, to cease to exist, to be erased from the memory of men. But he had to continue. He said, more smoothly, that no modification whatever had occurred or been planned in the organizing of propaganda, beyond an amicable arrangement between himself and the National War Aims Committee in regard to the exploitation of cinemas. True, the general ground had been explored; but all decisions were in the hands of the War Cabinet, and he might say for himself that he had not the least intention of attempting to impair the independence of other departments. And on and on. But it was useless. He was not being convincing. His grip was gone. The House was not listening, or listening only to condemn. He swam laboriously. The shore was hidden by great waves.

Then he had the misfortune to catch sight of Geoffrey among the spectators. The startling vision unnerved him. Why was Geoffrey there? He had said nothing to Sam about going. He had openly and bitterly despised politicians and the machinery of politics. He was gazing straight at his father. Sam's mind became a complete blank, as regards the speech. He could not speak. He was in danger of collapse. He thought of the story of the German mutiny in Brussels. It seemed to be his one hope. "Before I sit down I should like to tell the House some facts of which I can guarantee the authenticity." He related the story at length. The House was held, thrilled. Every head was turned towards him. He was making a sensation. In ten minutes, he thought, the story would be cabled to the ends of the world. No doubt he ought not to have done it, for he had consulted nobody as to the advisability of doing it, and he was saddling the Government with responsibility for an item which the Prime Minister had refused to credit. But he did it. After a poor, brief peroration he sat down, saved. (Cheers.) Many members left immediately to spread the news.

A peer belonging to the Opposition and an ex-minister spoke quite amiably about the Government, and there were other speeches, none of which was listened to. Finally Lord Ockleford, august leader of an august House, rose, and in a long piece of elaborate oratory made nothing clear except the fact that he was not supporting Sam. He was so close to Sam that the tail of his frock-coat rubbed against Sam's elbow. A positive malice against Sam glinted out at intervals from the smooth grey contours of his polished sentences. Sam, amazed, smiled to himself acidly. The noble earl sat down. Lord Lingham's motion was by leave withdrawn.

The House rose and emptied. The demonstration was over, having served its purpose of a warning note to the Government in general and to the Minister of Records in particular. Lord Ockleford, departing, gave him a very gracious smile.

In the precincts Sam was accosted by many, all anxious to learn from him, if possible, further details about the dazzling mutiny. Lord Lingham was among them. Whatever Lord Ockleford might have said, or thought, Sam was beyond question the hero of the moment and the observed of every eye. He was very excited by his reception, but unhappy. He felt thirsty and tired and had a faint, nervous cough.

"I must lie down and get a sleep," he said to himself. "If I don't have a nap I shall never manage the banquet tonight."

The press banquet occupied the largest ball-room in the hotel, with a large reception-room adjoining; and it now shone with the utmost magnificence that war-conditions would permit. The finest procurable food, champagne, port, cigars, abounded. The greatest editors in America confessed amazement at the profusion of hot-house flowers and hot-house fruit. A week or two earlier a teetotaller who smoked a pipe had raised a question about the national ability to pay for certain unheard-of luxuries--wines and cigars--supplied by a spendthrift Government to a group of overseas journalists on a visit to Glasgow. When asked whether there would not surely be trouble over the prodigious cost of the Savoy banquet, "That will be all right," said Sam, who had determined to bear the entire expense himself.

The Prime Minister arrived early. Sam had procured four members of the Government to speak: the Prime Minister because he was the Prime Minister and the most famous man in the world, and because he wanted to come; Tom Hogarth to display the bellicose pugnacity of John Bull in unsurpassable oratory; Sid Jenkin to prove that Britain was truly democratic; and the Colonial Premier because he was a colonial. Andy took his place by Sam's side near the entrance to the reception-room. His demeanour to Sam was very genial and somewhat noncommittal.

"You look a wee bit tired, Sam," said he. Not a word about Sam's performance in the afternoon.

Sam replied by mercilessly administering to him on the spot such a dose of overseas journalists as no Premier had ever before had to swallow. Droves of editors, each autocratic in his own sphere at home, swept into the great room, and Andy had to be the most famous man in the world to every one of them. And he successfully was.

The visitors, though indefatigably fresh, were really sated with hospitality. Each during his visit had had what he desired to the full. Those who wanted sociological inquiry, including the study of vice, those who wanted the aristocracy, those who wanted sight-seeing, those who wanted prize-fighting or sports, those who wanted religion, those who wanted the stage or the cinema, those who wanted the society of acquiescent ladies,--all had been humoured and satisfied, by experts in the various branches of activity. Their free and sometimes condescending criticism had been heard with respect and a promise to try to do better, and their praise stoically endured, by Britons whose secret conceit, compared to the ingenuous self-complacency of overseas, was as Mount Everest to Snowdon.

Now was the climax and zenith of the epical visit to the senile, worn-out country, and every Briton in the room knew that every traveller from overseas was knocked silly by the spectacle of what the sangfroid of the land of his fathers could accomplish in the midst of the most desperate altercation in history.

And it was Sam's night. Sam was once again shining in the foreheads of all the evening papers, by the great light of his German mutiny story, which had put a new complexion on the progress of the war--which indeed had in effect announced to the whole universe the impending downfall of the enemy, and brought smiles to the faces of millions. Sam knew it and felt it. He knew also that every journalist in a room crammed with journalists was expertly appreciating the news-value of the story, and setting him up as the very prince of newsmongers. What mattered the awful slip in his speech, the frightful narrowness of his escape from collapse? Naught! He stood far higher than ever in the admiration of peoples. He was a rival even to Andy himself. Withal he found opportunity to be particularly agreeable to his own men, who adored him for his comradeship and impatience of all extra-ministerial obstacles--to the returned Trumbull, whom he put in charge of French-speaking Canadians; to Mayden, who arrived later after supper--adding to the labour of organizing the banquet the labour of fitting nearly a hundred officials from outside buildings into the restricted spaces of the Ministry: to Sir Ernest Timmerson, whose praises he sounded into the ear of the richest editor in New York.

The last of all the nobs to arrive was Sid Jenkin. Sid drew Sam apart.

"A bit rough on you this afternoon, Ockleford! Eh?"

"Pooh!"

"I suppose ye know why?"

"Because I hadn't asked him to patronize this paltry banquet, no doubt."

"Not a bit of it. Because 'e's the leader of the Lords and Clyth didn't consult 'im personally before 'e appointed ye. Ocky 'as a great notion of the importance of maintaining 'is own discipline in the Lords."

Sam saw a sudden light in the darkness in which as a minister he had been compelled to exist. Nobody had ever told him anything worth knowing. He had been treated always as an intruder. He regarded it as symbolic that he had never even seen the Cabinet room of No. 10 Downing Street. And imagine the courtly Ockleford secreting his wrath for months until a supreme occasion arrived for venting it!

Never mind! Though Sam had prudently given up his project for centralizing all propaganda in his own Ministry, he had other projects, and they were maturing and he would carry them through because he was a power, and a popular idol, and destined to triumph. Mrs. Blacklow had foretold that all would be well. All, in fact, was well, and very well.

"Who's that dark fellow just in front?" Andy privately asked him as they were moving into the hall of the banquet. "I seem to know his face. I must have met him somewhere."

"I doubt if you've met him," said Sam, amiably smiling. He's only one of your numerous ministers. I won't tell you his name. Your mind mustn't be burdened with trivial details."

Andy had to laugh.

"You look a wee bit tired, Andy," said Sam; and to himself; "I shall pay for this, I expect."

But he never did pay for it. On this evening he got something for nothing.

The company slowly took the appointed seats at dinner. Sam as chairman had the middle seat at the north table, and Andy, opposite to him but far off, the middle seat at the south table. Twenty different varieties of nasal accent filled the grateful air.

Towards the end of the evening it had been established and many times ratified by libation that the English-speaking peoples--that was to say, Britain and her far-flung broods, including, of course, the people of the