When he moved away, a number of men who had already been talking to him after dinner, and some of the most agreeable women of the party besides, closed about him, making him, as it were, the centre of a conversation which was concerned almost entirely with the personalities and chances of the political moment. He was scarcely less astonished than Letty had been by his own position amongst the guests gathered under Maxwell's roof. Never had he been treated with so much sympathy, so much deference even. Clearly, if he willed it so, what had seemed the dislocation might only be the better beginning of a career. Nonsense! He meant to throw it all up as soon as Parliament met again in February. The state of his money affairs alone determined that. The strike was going from bad to worse. He must go home and look after his own business. It was a folly ever to have attempted political life. Meanwhile he felt the stimulus of his reception in a company which included some of the keenest brains in England. It appealed to his intelligence and virility, and they responded. Letty once, glancing at him, saw that he was talking briskly, and said to herself, with contradictory bitterness, that he was looking as well as ever, and was going, she supposed, to behave as if nothing had happened. "What is the matter with you to-night, my lady?" said Naseby, taking a seat beside his hostess. "May I be impertinent and guess?--you don't like your gems? Lady Leven has been telling me tales about them. They are the most magnificent things I ever saw. I condole with you." She turned rather listlessly to meet his bantering look. "'Come you in friendship, or come you in war?'" she said, pointing to a seat beside her. "I have no fight in me. But I have a great many things to say to you." He reddened for an instant, then recovered himself. "So have I to you," he said briskly. "In the first place, I have some fresh news from Mile End." She half laughed, as who should say, "You put me off," then surrendered herself with eagerness to the pleasure of his report. At the moment of his approach, under pretence of talking to an elderly cousin of Maxwell's, she had been lost in such an abstraction of powerless pity for George Tressady--whose fair head, somehow, never escaped her, wherever it moved--that she had hardly been able to bear with her guests or the burden of the evening.