His voice was dry and business-like. Only the wife who watched him perceived the silent dignity with which he had accepted her appeal. He went to sit beside Mrs. Allison, stooping over her, while they talked in a low key. Very soon she had caught at Marcella's suggestion, with an energy of despair. "But how can we find him?" she said at last, looking helplessly round the room, at the very chair, among others, where Tressady had just been sitting. Maxwell felt the humour of the situation without relishing it. "Either at his own house," he said shortly, "or the House of Commons." "He may have left town this morning. Lord Fontenoy thought"--she looked timidly at her companion--"that he would be sure to go and explain himself to his constituents at once." "Well, we can find out. If you give me instructions,--if you are sure this is what you want,--we will find out at once. Are you sure?" "I can think of nothing better," she said, with a piteous gesture. "And if he goes, I have only one message to give him. Ancoats knows that I have exhausted every argument, every entreaty. Now let him tell my son"--her voice grew firm, in spite of her look of anguish--"that if he insists on surrendering himself to a life of sin I can bear him company no more. I shall leave his house, and go somewhere by myself, to pray for him." Maxwell tried to soothe her, and there was some half-whispered talk between them, she quietly wiping away her tears from time to time. Meanwhile, Marcella and Fontenoy sat together a little way off, he at first watching Mrs. Allison, she silent, and making no attempt to play the hostess. Gradually, however, the sense of her presence beside him, the memory of Tressady's speech, of the scene in the House of the night before, began to work in his veins with a pricking, exciting power. His family was famous for a certain drastic way with women; his father, the now old and half-insane Marquis, had parted from his mother while Fontenoy was still a child, after scenes that would have disgraced an inn parlour. Fontenoy himself, in his reckless youth, had simply avoided the whole sex, so far as its reputable members were concerned; till one woman by sympathy, by flattery perhaps, by the strange mingling in herself of iron and gentleness, had tamed him. But there were brutal instincts in his blood, and he became conscious of them as he sat beside Marcella Maxwell. Suddenly he broke out, bending forward, one hand on his knee, the other nervously adjusting the eyeglass without which he was practically blind. "I imagine your side had foreseen last night better than we had?" She drew herself together instantly. "One can hardly say. It was evident, wasn't it, that the House as a whole was surprised? Certainly, no one could have foreseen the numbers." She met his look straight, her white hand playing with Mrs. Allison's card.