“Oh, have I not been prudence itself up to the present?” There was a suspicion in her voice--a suspicion of scorn,--he remembered that distinctly as he sat in his rooms recalling the whole scene an hour after it had been enacted. With that note--that half tone of scorn--their little chat ceased, for Guy Overton had come up and after him Lady Severn and Mr. Shirley, so that all that remained for him to do was to give a tender pressure with a look of courteous carelessness that was meant to prevent the possibility of any one with eyes fancying that there was tenderness in his pressure of Miss West’s fingers. And now he was asking himself the question: “_Who is the Other Man?_” Ernest Clifton had a pretty good working acquaintance with the motives of men and women--not perhaps, quite so complete an acquaintance with these motives as he fancied he had, but still a very fair knowledge; and therefore he was asking himself that question: “_Who is the Other Man?_” He had had a good deal of trouble persuading Josephine during the preceding autumn to agree to engage herself to marry him. It had not been done in a minute. He had never before had such difficulty persuading a girl to give him such a promise. She was what physicians call “an obstinate case.” Hers was psychologically an obstinate case; but she had yielded at last to his treatment, and had given him her promise. He flattered himself that it was his own cleverness--his own cleverness of argument--his own personality, for was not cleverness part of his personality?--that had brought her to perceive that she would be doing well to promise to marry him and at the same time to keep that promise a secret from her own father and mother and all the world besides. He remembered how he had impressed her by his story of his early struggles. He had appealed to her imagination by telling her how humble his career had been in its beginning--how, being the third son of a doctor in a village in Warwickshire, he had been thrown on the world to shift for himself when he was sixteen years of age--how he had, while working as a reporter on the staff of a Birmingham newspaper, starved himself in order to have money enough to pass University examinations and take a degree and, later on, to get called to the Bar. He told her how he had given up much of his time when practically behind the scenes at Birmingham to the study of the political machinery of a great party, with the result that he had worked himself into the position of the Secretary of the Organisation, becoming a power in his political party--a man with whom in critical times, the Head of the Cabinet had conferred before venturing upon legislation that might have a tendency to alienate a considerable proportion of his friends.