The trouble with his left lung which had so endeared him to his fellow-citizens, he felt far less keenly in the beginning of a warm spring than at any other time, and evenings such as this rewarded him for the sacrifice he made every winter to his duty and to England. Of the four years during which he had held the highest of human offices he had spent but one winter on the Riviera, and though it had been necessary in one year to forego an Autumn session, such a session had not in the other three years delayed the meeting of Parliament beyond the end of February. His youth stood him in good stead during this ordeal; but there were those (and they were they who loved him most) who looked with anxiety upon the frail form and thought, although they dared not say, that the years were slipping by and that what a man could do with impunity when still upon the right side of fifty, would become another matter when his fifty-fifth year was passed.... There was of course always the hope of opposition and its leisure.... The Broadening of the Streets Bill had roused a tempest of Party passion.... He had already been publicly stoned in the North.... But no matter; for the moment the Prime Minister was full of appreciation, and for his cousin’s purposes in the kindliest of moods. Nevertheless he thought (and his cousin read his thoughts) that she was asking the impossible. An idea struck him. “Has Dimmy been called to the Bar?” he asked. She looked up, puzzled. “I don’t think so.... No, I know he hasn’t. I put up a hundred for him in 1908 and he buzzed it. I should certainly have heard if he had done anything more before his marriage. Naturally _since_ then....” “Yes, naturally,” said the Prime Minister sympathetically. He mused. “He wouldn’t go abroad?” he said, looking round. “What on earth’s the good of that?” said Mary Smith a little testily. “Well,” answered the Prime Minister vaguely, as he reviewed certain posts in his mind, “... No. There isn’t much in that. Anything that could be of any use wants leading up to.” And he plunged into thought again. Then with a gesture that many had noticed in him and had thought a mere idle trick but which was really an accompaniment to calculation, he put his ten fingers down upon his knees and lifted them slowly one after another. When he had so lifted nine (it was the ring finger of his left hand) a touch of animation passed over his face, an expression his cousin could see even in that subdued light. “How long does he want it for?” he asked. Mary Smith was inclined to say “For ever,” but she checked herself; she remembered the face and manner of Theocritus C. Benson, she trusted his future fortune, and she said: “I think even a little while would make a difference.”