"Ormond ran off to town directly after breakfast--as if he were afraid of being asked too many questions. I have an idea that he kept the cat in the bag. I saw my cousin Zeal yesterday, and thought he looked as if he had something besides his health on his mind." "Why?" asked Mrs. Kaye, startled. "What else could it be?" "Well, Bratty was rather a flasher," said Gwynne, innocently. "The dinner may not have been at the Club at all, and there is a little chorus-girl that engaged the fickle Bratty's affections for a time, and proclaimed her desire for vengeance from the house-tops when he transferred himself to a rival at the Adelphi. She is a Neapolitan, and that sort may carry a stiletto even in prosaic old London. Or perhaps poor Bratty was despatched with the carving-knife. No wonder he didn't want his family. But whatever it was, he has paid the penalty himself, poor chap, and no doubt the matter will be hushed up." "How disgusting! I don't want to think of human slums on this heavenly Sunday morning." "Nor to be proposed to, I suppose?" "I don't mind, Jack dear." She looked girlish and very piquant. Jack took her hand. She did not withdraw it, and they walked silently in the shadowed quiet of the wood. His heart beat almost audibly. Never before had she given him such definite encouragement. He could think of nothing to say that would not sound banal to this woman of the ready tongue. But agitation unlocks wayward fancies and sends them scurrying inopportunely across the very foreground of the mind. The vagrant hope that she would not accept him in an epigram restored his balance, and he turned to her with his habitual air of confidence, albeit his eyes and mouth were restless. "I want an answer to-day," he said, boldly. "And there is only one answer I will take. I have let you play with me, as that seemed to be your caprice, and I love caprice in a woman. But there is an end to everything and I want to marry before Parliament meets." "And you never thought I would not marry you?" she asked, in some wonder. "I have never faced the possibility of failure in my life. And you are as much to me as my career. I cannot imagine life without either." He suddenly put his hand under her chin and lifted her face; she was of tiny stature and this disadvantage in the presence of man was not the least subtle of her charms. "Say yes quickly," he cried, and the strength of his will and passion vibrated to her through the medium he had established. But she pouted and drew back. "Perhaps I want a career of my own. You would swallow me whole." "You could become the most powerful woman in the Liberal party--have a salon and all the rest of it." "I happen to be a Conservative." "What has that to do with it? Or politics with love, for that matter? Tell me that you love me. That is all I care about."