Somewhere in the din George stumbled across Lady Leven, who was talking merrily to young Bayle; and found her, notwithstanding, very ready to turn and chat with him. "Of course we are all waiting for the Maxwells," she said to him. "Will they come, I wonder?" "Why not?" "Do people show on their way to disaster? I think I should stay at home if I were she." "Why, they have to hearten their friends!" "No good," said Betty, pursing her pretty lips; "and they have fought so hard." "And may win yet," said George, an odd sparkle in his eye, as he stood looking over his tiny companion to the door. "Nobody is sure of anything, I can tell you." "I don't believe _you_ care," she said audaciously, shaking her golden head at him. "Pray, why?" "Oh! you don't seem at all desperate," she said coolly. "Perhaps you're like Frank--you think the other side make so much better points than you do. 'If Dowson makes another speech,' Frank said to me yesterday, 'I vow I shall rat!' There's a way of talking of your own chiefs. Oh! I shall have to take him out of politics." And she unfurled her fan with a jerk half melancholy, half decided. Then, suddenly, a laugh flashed over her face; she raised herself eagerly on tiptoe. "Ah! bravo!" she said. "Here they are!" George turned with the crowd, and saw them enter, Marcella first, in a blaze of diamonds; then the quiet face and square shoulders of her husband. Nothing, he thought, could have been better than the manner in which both bore themselves as they passed through the throng, answering the greetings of friend and foe, and followed by the keen or hostile scrutiny of hundreds. There was no bravado, no attempt to disguise the despondency that must naturally follow on a division so threatening and in many ways so wounding. Maxwell looked grey with fatigue and short nights, while her black eyes passed wistfully from friend to friend, and had never been more quick, more responsive. Their cause was in danger; nevertheless, the impression on Tressady's mind was of two people consciously in the grip of forces infinitely greater than they--forces that would hold on their path whatever befell their insignificant mortal agents. I steadier step when I recall, Howe'er I slip, thou canst not fall. So cries the thinker to his mistress, Truth. And in the temper of that cry lies the secret of brave living. One looker-on, at least,--and that an opponent,--recalled the words as he watched Marcella and her husband taking their way through the London crowd, amid the doubts of their friends and the half-concealed triumph of their foes. It seemed to him that he could have no chance of speech with her. But presently, from the other side of the room, he saw that she had recognised and was greeting him, and, do what he would, he must needs make his way to her.