He took them with a groan and yielded as yield he must to her command that he should set them down. They were of no importance, the one was to his uncle by a second marriage, the First Civil Lord, to ask him the name of a Company that had proved less able than was expected in the manufacture of armour plates; the other to his cousin the Chancellor of the Exchequer asking if the action of some obscure servant of the Treasury in a peaceful Buckinghamshire village had received the attention which his recent services seemed to require. The day and hour came round. George Mulross in a voice perhaps a little more assured than that of two days before, said when his turn came: “Twenty-nine.” To his surprise the Chancellor of the Exchequer answered with some tartness that he had nothing whatever to add to his predecessor’s answer of July 9th ten years before, and added amid general approval, that insinuations such as were those contained in the question were greatly to be deplored. A man of excitable temperament had already leapt to his feet to ask a supplementary question when he was sharply checked by the Chair and the curious incident closed. Some ten minutes passed and once again, sweating with fear, Demaine heard his name called out and said in a voice still audible: “Fifty-four.--I mean Forty-five.” The First Lord of the Admiralty rose solemnly in all the dignity of his great white beard, adjusted his spectacles, looked fully at the intruder upon his peace, and said with his unmistakable accent, that the name of the Company could be dithcovered through the ordinary thourceth of information. So the game continued for ten days. In vain did his friends assure him that he was losing position in the House by this perpetual pose of the puritan and the sleuth hound. Mary Smith was a woman who must be obeyed, and of twenty-three questions which she put into his unwilling lips at least one had gone home. And the First Lord of the Admiralty in the same dignity of the same white beard and with the same striking accent, had admitted the nethethity of thtriking from the litht of contractorth the name of the firm of which, until that moment, the unhappy George Mulross had never even heard. He knew, he felt, that he, the most blameless of men, was making enemies upon every side. The allusions to his public spirit which were now occasionally to be discovered in the Opposition papers, the little bitter sentences in those which were upon the contrary subsidised by his own party, filled him with an equal dread. He was in no mood for going further, when upon the top of all this Mary Smith quietly insisted that he must make a speech.