But, indeed, George came, without any pressing, almost every day. He saw her in her bursts of gaiety and affectation, when the habits of a lifetime asserted themselves as strongly as ever; and he saw her in her moments of pain and collapse, when she could hide the omens of inexorable physical ill neither from herself nor him. By the doctor's advice, he ceased to press her to give in, to resign herself to bed and invalidism. It was best, even physically, to let her struggle on. And he was both astonished and touched by her pluck. She had never been so repellent to him as on those many occasions in the past when she had feigned illness to get her way. Now that Death was really knocking, the half-gay, half-frightened defiance with which she walked the palace of life, one moment listening to the sounds at the gate, the next throwing herself passionately into the revelry within, revealed to the son a new fact about her--a fact of poetry unutterably welcome. Even her fawning dependents, the Fullertons, ceased to annoy him. They were poor parasites, but she thought for them, and they professed to love her in return. She had emptied her life of finer things, but this relation of patron and flatterer, such as it was, did something to fill the vacancy; and George made no further effort to disturb it. It was surprising, indeed, how easily, as the weeks went on, he came to bear many of those ways of hers which had once set him most on edge--even her absurd outbursts of affection towards him, and preposterous praise of him in public. In time he submitted even to being flown at and kissed before the Fullertons. Amazing into what new relations that simple perspective of _the end_ will throw all the stuff of life! * * * * * In Parliament the weeks rushed by. The first and comparatively non-contentious sections of the Bill passed with a good deal of talk and delay. George spoke once or twice, without expecting to speak, instinctively pleasing Fontenoy where he could. They had now but little direct intercourse. But George did not feel that his leader had become his enemy, and was not slow to recognise a magnanimity he had not foreseen. Yet, after all, he had not offered the worst affront to party discipline. Fontenoy could still count on his vote. As to the rest of his party, he saw that he was to be finally reckoned as a "crank," and let alone. It was not, he found, altogether to be regretted. The position gave him a new freedom of speech.