"Well, I think the Government may see that, too. They know perfectly well that Jack doesn't care one straw about party questions. He has said as much. What he does care about is the Empire--I think he cares for it more than anything else in the world--and what he knows about is the army. And if this cry for efficiency--which certainly is getting louder--in the country continues, they will have a far better chance of remaining in power if Jack is put at the War Office." They had come to the far end of the meadow, and Marie paused a moment, looking at the broad, patient stream. Hundreds of pleasure-boats were scattered over its surface, and electric launches and river steamers crowded with roaring Sunday excursionists did their best to make vile one of the most beautiful rivers in the world. Each, indeed, seemed a Bedlam let loose and packed tight. Even the stuffy little cabins were full of feather-hatted girls and amorous young men, who changed hats with each other, without finding the brilliancy of this wit grow the least stale even in endless repetition; took alternate mouthfuls of solid refreshment out of paper bags and of beer out of the same bottle, with shouts of laughter at slightly indelicate suggestions. The poor river was flecked with fragments of bun-bags and floating bottles where trout should have been feeding, and echoes of the music-halls, with absolutely independent wheezings of concertinas, owning no suzerainty, by way of accompaniment, came to Marie and her companion with that curious sharp distinctness with which sound travels over water. For a moment they stood there in silence; then Marie turned quickly in the direction of the lawn behind them, and back to the river again. "After all--" she said half to herself. Jim laughed. It was somehow strangely pleasant to him to find himself, as Marie had said, thinking in harness. "Yes, but less loudly so," he answered, replying to that which she had not said. "So it seems to us. Those good folk on the river don't seem loud to themselves. But--oh dear me, Jim! what an awkward and inconvenient thing it is to be different from the people one moves among!" He did not feel that he owed her any mercy on this point. She had refused deliberately the other life he had once offered her. "Ah, you find that, do you?" he said, his love for her surging up with bitterness in his throat. "Yet you chose it yourself." They had begun walking back towards the lawn again, but at his words Marie suddenly stopped. From one side came the sound of laughter and talk, from the other, now more remote, fragments of "D'isy, D'isy." She well knew what was in his mind, and thanked him silently for not putting it into words. "I know I did," she said; "and no doubt the very fact that I am different to most of my _milieu_ is what makes it so entertaining."