“Annette never has,” said Crane, rising and throwing away his cigar. “Some time, if you wish to call on Miss Maitland, I’ll take you round.” Thorndyke restrained the temptation to brain Crane with the carafe on the table by him, partly out of regard for himself, partly out of regard to Crane, and partly from the fact that Crane was a much bigger man than he was. But his colleague was evidently quite unconscious of Thorndyke’s bloody inclinations, and thought himself the best fellow in the world to be willing to give Thorndyke a view into the paradise of Constance Maitland’s company. “And as for my streak of luck, as you call it, I intend to devote all my powers to my work, so that no matter what other committee makes a fool of itself, the Committee on Foreign Affairs won’t--at least through its chairman,” Crane continued. “It’s easy enough to steer that committee when everything is peaceful,” answered Thorndyke, meaning to take the new chairman down a peg. “And it’s a great deal easier when we get into a continental mess as we are now. Wait until you get on the Ways and Means, or Committee on Elections, or Banking and Currency, if you want to have a little Gehenna of your own on earth. Good-night.” Thorndyke sat up smoking until after two o’clock. His thoughts were not concerned with Crane’s political future, nor with his own either, nor with the continental mess. He was thinking about that dead-and-gone time, and how far away it was; the moderns did not make love through the medium of sentimental songs to the guitar and to stanzas from Childe Harold. They preferred ragtime on the mandolin and the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám; and they no longer seemed to fall in love in the painful and whole-souled manner which had befallen him; and then he wandered off into thinking how a man’s will could go so far and no farther, and how he should feel when he saw Constance Maitland, as he must eventually, and how she would look and speak. He concluded, before he went to bed, that he had experienced that unlucky accident, the breaking of heart, which would not mend, do what he could; for he was one of those rare and unfortunate men who can love but once. _Chapter Two_ THE RISE OF A PREMIER AND SOMETHING ABOUT TWO HEARTS