When she mentioned Berwick, the colour had flooded her face, and O'Flaherty had looked away. "Oh yes, I've met Oliver Boringdon," he said quickly, and to give her time to recover herself he went on, "I remember him in the House. But I had the luck to get in again, and he was thrown out, at the last General Election. The two friends are an interesting contrast. I regard James Berwick as the typical Parliament man; not so Mr. Boringdon, who is much more the permanent official, the plodding civil servant--that was what he was originally, you know--and Berwick did him a bad turn in taking him away from that career and putting him into Parliament." "But you do think well of Mr. Berwick? I mean, do you consider, as does his sister, that he has a great future before him?" She looked at her companion in undisguised anxiety, and O'Flaherty felt rather touched by the confidence Barbara evidently reposed in his judgment. "I think," he said--and he offered up a mental prayer that he might so speak as to help, not hinder, the woman by his side--"that James Berwick's future will depend on the way he shapes his life. Do not think me priggish--but the one thing that seems to me sure is that character still tells more than ability in English public life. Character and ability together are apt to prove irresistible." "But what," asked Barbara in a low voice, "do you exactly mean by character?" "I mean something which Oliver Boringdon possesses to a supreme degree--a number of qualities which together make it positively more difficult for a man to go wrong than to go right, especially in any matter affecting his honour or probity." "Then--surely you regard Mr. Berwick as a man of character?" O'Flaherty hesitated. The conversation was taking a strange turn, but he made up his mind to tell her the truth as far as he saw it. "I think," he said deliberately, "that it is very difficult for a man of great ability to be also a man of flawless character. He is probably tempted in a thousand ways which pass the less gifted nature by; on the other hand, his fate is much more in his own control. Berwick has come very well out of ordeals partly brought about by his own desire to succeed. Take his rather singular marriage."--the speaker looked straight before him--"Of course I well remember that episode in his life. Men marry every day for money, but Berwick conducted himself with propriety and dignity under extremely trying circumstances." "Did you ever see her?"--there was a painful catch in Barbara's voice--"she was a friend, was she not, of Miss Berwick?" "Hardly a friend--rather a worshipping acquaintance. No, I never saw Mrs. James Berwick. She was rather an invalid both before and after the marriage. I think she did a very wrong thing by her husband--one that may even yet have evil consequences. You are doubtless aware that in the event of Berwick's making a second marriage he loses the immense fortune his wife left to him."