"This is unusual," he remarked; "but, you see, I have an excuse."

She followed the direction of his finger: "Death of the Member for North Mallow." The cream of the news was contained for her in the heading, and so she did not read the rest of the notice, which was a short one.

Now, North Mallow was the respectable const.i.tuency in which a coalition of two parties had selected Mr. Sylvester to be their candidate at the next election, which this death had transferred into the immediate present.

"My dear boy!" said Mrs. Sylvester sympathetically.

Then she checked herself, recognising that a too open satisfaction in the event--opportune as it might be--would be hardly decent.

"Of course, it is very sad for him, poor man!" she remarked. "But I cannot help feeling glad that you should be in the House, and so much sooner than we expected."

He interrupted her with another discreet embrace.

"My dear boy!" she said again vaguely, contentedly, as she poured herself a cup of tea.

"He has been in bad health for some time," continued Charles. "He died two days ago at Cannes. It is astonishing that I did not hear the news before. I have wired to Hutchins, my election agent, and if I can manage it, I shall run down to Mallow. Of course one is sorry, but since it has been ordered so, after all, one has to think of the party."

"Ah yes, the party," murmured Mrs. Sylvester sympathetically; "of course that is the great thing. I am sure you will distinguish yourself. I suppose there is no danger of a defeat?"

"Oh, it is a safe seat! But one has always to canva.s.s; there is always a certain risk. I sometimes wish----" He stopped short, pulled nervously at his collar, finding it a little difficult to express his meaning. "I think," he went on at last with a visible effort, flushing somewhat, "that I must marry. An intelligent woman devoted to my interests would be of great service to me now."

Mrs. Sylvester allowed her eyes to remain in discreet observation of the tablecloth.

"I have often thought so," she said at last quietly.

"Indeed!" he remarked politely. "Yes; it is a matter, perhaps, which I should have discussed with you before. I am fully aware of the right you have---- I would not, I mean, have failed----"

"Oh, my son!" she protested, "I am sure you have always been most correct."

"I have tried to be," he said simply. "If I have said nothing to you, it has been because I wished to be cautious, not to commit myself, to be very sure----"

"Of the lady's affection, do you mean?"

"Ah, can one ever be sure of that? No; I mean rather of my own att.i.tude, of my own situation. It has always seemed to me that marriage is a very great undertaking, a thing to be immensely considered, not to be embarked on rashly."

"You view everything so justly!" she exclaimed. "Have you--am I to understand that you have a particular person in view?"

He waved aside the compliment with a bland gesture, which a.s.serted that only his magnanimity prevented him from acknowledging its truth.

"Surely, surely!" he said. "You are perhaps aware how immensely I admire Miss Masters; that I have paid her very great attention--marked attention, I may say?"

"I observed something of the kind at Lucerne. I did not know if it had continued; sometimes I thought so. Have you proposed to her?"

"No," he said slowly; "I have not yet proposed to her. Naturally, I wished to consult you first."

"I am sure, Charles," said his mother cheerfully, "that I shall be extremely pleased. She is a very nice girl. She is a great-niece of Lord Hazelbury, and connected with the Marshes, and I know she will have at least sixty thousand pounds."

He glanced across at her, frowning a little, with a certain irritation.

"I shall not marry her for her money," he said.

"My dear boy," she retaliated, "I did not suppose you would be mercenary; only, a little money is very desirable; and Lady Garnett has a great deal, and Mary will certainly get her share of it."

"Ah, I don't like her," put in Charles inconsequently; "she is a profane old woman."

"Neither do I; but one must accept her. And Mary, after all, is only her niece."

"She has a beautiful character," he continued slowly. (This time he was not speaking of Lady Garnett.) "I admire it more than I can say; it has very great depths."

His mother looked up at him quickly, struck by his strenuous accent, for which she was scarcely prepared. She had a high notion of his character, of his ability, and was pleased, more pleased than she cared to admit, at the suitability of the match. He had always been an excellent, even a sympathetic son; and it had been part of his excellence that whenever he should marry, she had been quite certain that he would marry like this, selecting with dignity a young woman whom one could emphatically approve--a testimony to his constancy in certain definite traditions in which he had been reared, traditions, it may be said, which he adhered to with a tenacity that even exceeded her own.

It had never entered into her calculations, however, to look upon him as an ardent lover, and yet it was as an ardent lover that he had just spoken. She recognised the tone.

And, strangely enough, for the moment it happened to touch her, to give her an increased interest in the affair, though afterwards she could reflect that in a man of Charles' character, so soberly practical and mature, it was perhaps a trifle incongruous, and, at the best, not precisely the tone by which women are most likely to be won.

She said placidly:

"I hope you will succeed. If you take my advice, you will speak at once."

"I had meant to take the first occasion," he said.

"Ah, my dear," she put in, "you had better make one yourself."

Charles simply smiled. Her approbation of his views, and the unwonted dissipation of a prolonged and indolent breakfast, together with the pleasant excitement of shortly taking the political field, had rendered him singularly mild.

He remembered that he was invited that night to a dance of some magnitude, at a house big enough for privacy to be easily secured, and where Mary would certainly be.

"Perhaps I will," he said, gathering up his voluminous papers as he prepared for departure, "this evening."

He was still in the same mood of cheerful resolution when, after an exceptionally busy day, which had also ministered in an exceptional degree to his self-esteem (it had included an interview with one of the whips of his party, as well as a satisfactory conversation with his agent on the temper of the const.i.tuency whose member was so seasonably deceased), he had dressed at his club, and dawdled at his accustomed table in the large bright room over a solitary dinner.

His head had been very full of his political ambitions, into which the image of Miss Masters had not inconveniently intruded. He had eminently that orderly faculty of detachment which allows a man to separate and disconnect the various interests of his life, admitting each only in its due order and place; but none the less had he been conscious all along that somewhere in the background of his mind her image subsisted, and now that he was at leisure again to give her that place of honour in his consideration which she had long been insensibly acquiring, he was more than ever determined to do all that lay in his power to make her his wife.

It amazed him almost that he had not put the important question long before, so vital and inevitable had it become; and he scarcely considered, in his curious egoism, his scant acquaintance with the subtilty of a woman's mind, how much Mary herself might have contributed to the delay by her careful avoidance of intimate topics, by the cloak of elaborate indifference in which she had wrapped herself whenever she had not been able to avoid being alone with him; so that, however much he had desired it, he could never, without doing her gross violence, have succeeded in striking the precisely right personal note.

To-night, however, there should be no more fencing; of that he was thoroughly resolved. He would be eloquent and sustained, impa.s.sioned, and, if necessary, humble--but, above all, perfectly direct; he would brook no faltering, feminine evasions; would insist on an answer, and on a right answer too, pointing out, with the close reasoning acquired in his profession, the superb propriety of the match. And he believed that she would be convinced. Was it not half of her attraction that she was a woman of intelligence, not a silly school-girl, who flirted and danced?

In spite of his self-esteem, however, he was not unwise enough to feel sure of the result. Were not all women, even the best of them, notoriously perverse? And there was always, conceivably, that inopportune third party, a preferred rival, to be counted with, who might have been first on the field.

Considering these things, he allowed himself a gla.s.s of chartreuse with his coffee, and the unwonted luxury of a cigar, over which he lingered, growing more nervous as its white ash lengthened and the occasion drew near. Yet he could remind himself at last that--at any rate, to his knowledge--there was no one else whose pretensions the lady preferred, since Rainham, the man whom he had marked as dangerous, was socially d.a.m.ned, and no longer to be feared.

It was very nearly eleven before he reached the house to which he had been invited, and where he found a very brilliant party already in progress. The house was chiefly a legal and political one, although there seemed to be a fair leaven of literary and artistic celebrities among the more solid reputations; and for some time he was engrossed by various of his Parliamentary acquaintances, who questioned and encouraged him. Two or three had newly arrived from the House, where an important division had just been declared; and Charles listened with some impatience to their account of it, gazing absently, over their heads, at the maze of pretty toilettes, which made an agreeable _frou-frou_ over the polished floor, although the debate had been upon a question in which he was warmly interested.

He escaped from them at last with a murmured apology, an intimation that he wished to find somebody, and made his way slowly into the adjoining room, from which the strains of waltz music floated in, and where they danced. His friends found his demeanour noticeable, and were inclined to wonder with some amus.e.m.e.nt, knowing his habitual equanimity, that the vacancy at North Mallow should have undermined it. When he entered the ball-room he stopped for a moment, flushing a little. The first person he had seen, between the heads of the floating couples, was Lady Garnett, on a little raised seat at the further end of the large room, engaged in an animated conversation with an amba.s.sador. He realized quickly that she would not have come alone.

He waited until the music ceased and the dispersal of the dancers made the pa.s.sage of the floor practicable, then he set off in her direction, trusting that he might find her niece in the vicinity.

Halfway down he stopped again; he had recognised his sister, who fanned herself languidly, seated on one of two chairs partially concealed by a great ma.s.s of exotic shrubbery, in pots, which formed almost an alcove. She removed her long soft skirt, which she had thrown over the vacant seat, as he approached; and at this tacit invitation he accepted it.

"Only until the rightful owner comes," he explained. "But I see you so seldom now that I must not lose this chance. I suppose you are keeping it for someone?"