Brook looked at her quickly.

"Perhaps you would like some tea Mrs. Rames. Shall we go? The debate will tail off for a bit after Fall has finished."

He led the way to the lift. Cynthia hurried after him.

"Why?" she cried. "And what do you mean by tailing off?" There was an impatience in her voice with which Brook was unfamiliar. "Do you mean that the debate will collapse?"

"Oh, no," he replied. "But the big-wigs won't speak until later. The subject is much too important to drop for want of argument. Indeed, there are enough men eager to speak to carry the debate well over to-morrow, if that were possible."

They came out from the lift and walked down the long corridor toward the lobby between the rows of books protected by their frames of gilt wire. Robert Brook continued cheerfully:

"Rames, to be sure, wasn't at his best in opening the debate. But no man is always at his best. There's not a soul in the House who doesn't know that."

"Then this afternoon won't put him back?"

"Why should it? It was he who had the shrewdness to recognize the opportunity which this question affords, and to select this particular line of attack. He engineered the whole movement. That's known. And if he carries his own people into the division lobby with him, and the opposition into the bargain, he will have established a fine reputation for Parliamentary capacity. That counts, Mrs. Rames, take the word-of an old hand. That counts here more than speech-making."

"Does it?" cried Cynthia, smiles breaking through the tragic gloom of her countenance. But the smiles vanished. She shook her head wistfully. "You are merely saying this because you see that I am troubled."

"But it's none the less true. This House has a corporate life which is rather difficult for those who are not members of it to understand."

Robert Brook certainly seemed very well contented. Cynthia, however, was not satisfied.

"But will he carry his people with him into the division lobby--now?"

she asked. "Won't they a little have lost faith?"

"Not a bit. You see Howard Fall has quite saved the situation," Brook replied cheerily, and Cynthia suddenly stepped on ahead. The name of Howard Fall was beginning to exasperate her. She stopped, however, as they came into the round hall of the lobby.

"On the whole," she said, with the loftiest impartiality, "I liked my husband's speech a good deal better than I did Mr. Howard Fall's.

Perhaps on a second thought you will too, Mr. Brook."

She surveyed him steadily with a pair of cold blue eyes, and then her face suddenly dimpled to a smile of appeal.

"You really mean that I can't see him?"

"The man who starts a discussion must hear it out. That's a sound old rule, and if it's not so religiously kept as it used to be, the House of Commons is the worse."

"I can send him a little note at all events."

"Certainly. Write it and I'll give it to a messenger."

"A messenger!" said Cynthia doubtfully. "Will it be sure to reach him?

It's rather important."

Brook smiled.

"Very well. I'll take it in myself, Mrs. Rames."

Cynthia took a little diary from the bag she carried, tore out a leaf, scribbled hastily:

"You did splendidly. Everybody thinks so. Cynthia;" and having calmly perpetrated that obvious untruth, she twisted up her message and handed it to Brook. The sandy-haired man from the Shires was drifting about the lobby. Brook called to him. "Look after Mrs. Rames for a moment, will you?" he said, and hurried off through the swing-doors.

It seemed a very short time to Cynthia before he came back, though in that short time she had not so much as addressed a word to her companion. She looked at Robert Brook's hands. They were empty and a shadow pa.s.sed over her face.

"Did you give it him?" she asked.

"I pa.s.sed it along the bench and saw that it reached him. I didn't wait for him to open it."

The shadow pa.s.sed from Cynthia. She was disappointed now, but not hurt; and in a second the disappointment pa.s.sed too. This was not the day on which small things should be allowed to sting.

"Now you'll have some tea," said Brook.

"No, I don't think I will stay any longer to-day, Mr. Brook," she replied. Now that her fears were dispersed she was in a hurry to get away and be alone with her new secret. "I am keeping you from the House, and you are our Whip, aren't you?"

The flattery did not compensate Mr. Brook for his loss. The privilege of parading a pretty and well-dressed woman before the envious eyes of less fortunate colleagues is one which no member of Parliament, not even its sedatest representative of non-conformity, would forego without regret; and in a remote philandering way, Robert Brook was a kind of lady's man. Cynthia was wearing a trim coat and skirt of dark velvet, and from a coil of fur about her throat her face rose like a summer flower, and was framed in the wide border of her blue hat.

"My duties are light just now," he protested, but Cynthia lifted up her hands in her great m.u.f.f appealingly and coaxed him.

"You will let me go now, Mr. Brook, won't you?" Her eyes besought his permission as though without it she could not go, and Mr. Brook was duly reduced to subservience.

"Good-by," said Cynthia, and she swung off, the long ends of her stole swinging about her hips, and her step indescribably light. Robert Brook watched her pa.s.s down the corridor to the rails where the visitors waited, and sighed in a melancholy fashion. It seemed to him for the moment contemptible to be a bachelor. For there was something strangely appealing about Cynthia, to-day--a winsomeness, a warmth.

She seemed all a-quiver with youth. A swift variety of moods swept across her face in lights and shadows, and gave to her vitality. Her feet moved with a dancing buoyancy. All that Robert Brook felt the sandy-haired man from the Shires summarized in one reflective sentence:

"I should like to kiss that girl," he said. "It would do me a great deal of good."

CHAPTER x.x.x

THE LETTER

Cynthia ran down the broad flight of steps into Westminster Hall, and skimmed across the historic flags of the ancient building without a pause. What at this moment was Charles the First to her, or even Mr.

Gladstone? She came out into Palace Yard and drove home through the dusk just as the lamps in the shop-windows were beginning to bring some gleams of cheerfulness into the black February streets. She sat back in the corner of her car with her m.u.f.f tightly held against her breast as though to cherish close some knowledge treasured there. When she reached her house she let herself in with her key and walked with secret steps into Harry's study. Once there she locked the door and with the firelight dancing upon the walls to keep her company, she sat down to make her reckoning with herself. But in truth the reckoning was already made.

The great bargain, on her side at all events, was a bargain no more, could never again be a bargain. A veritable revolution had taken place in her that afternoon. She knew it from the depth of her sympathy with Harry in his failure--above all from the surprising sharpness of her disappointment when Robert Brook had returned with no answer to her scribbled message.

For the failure as a factor in their fortunes she cared not a straw.

Indeed, she welcomed it, since it was that which had wakened her. She had believed herself to be defective in the quality of pa.s.sion, and her sense of the defect had hurt her like a bitter humiliation; she had envied wistfully the other women who possessed pa.s.sion, even the wantons who flaunted it. Now the humiliation was gone. She rejoiced.

She leaned back in her chair with her eyes closed and sailed over magical seas which were joyous and golden. She loved. She was like some lady of old Italy lit to swift flame by the first kiss from her lover's lips. Only it was a trivial irony in closer keeping with our modern days that what had kindled her who had demanded ideas, was a failure due to nothing but the lack of them.

Cynthia rejoiced; for she loved. That pain and disappointment were in store for her she did not doubt. But she ran forward to meet the pain.

She was young. Sooner all the pain in the world than the placidity of years without fire or inspiration. She recognized frankly that though upon her side the bargain was no longer any bargain at all, it still was just a bargain to her husband. A sign had been given to her that afternoon, a little sign, yet great in its significance. She had pleaded to herself as she sat in the ladies' gallery that when Harry rose, and just before he began to speak, he had looked up to where she sat, as though he were conscious of her presence, as though he drew strength from it. But he had not looked up. Even at the time she had known that he had not.

"I merely pretended to myself that he had," she frankly admitted now.

"His movement was nothing more than the natural muscular action of a man bracing himself for an effort." She herself, Cynthia, had not been, she felt sure, at that moment, in the remotest of his thoughts.

"If Harry had changed toward me as I have toward him," she argued, "he would have looked up, not only because he wanted to, but because he would have remembered what I had said to him on that very point the afternoon when he asked me to marry him."