She! The remembrance of how her whole nature had brightened from its cloud as he drew out for her his own forecast of what might still happen; the sweet confidence and charm that she had shown him; the intimacy of the tone she had allowed between them; the mingling all through of a delicate abstinence from anything touching on his own personal position, with an unspoken recognition of it--the impulse of a generosity that could not help rewarding what seemed to it the yielding of an adversary; these things filled him with a delicious pleasure as he walked home. In a hundred directions--political, social, spiritual--the old horizons of the mind seemed to be lightening and expanding. The cynical, indifferent temper of his youth was breaking down; the whole man was more intelligent, capable, tender. Yet what sadness and restlessness of soul as soon as the brief moment of joy had come and gone! A few afternoons of Supply encroached upon the eight days that still remained before the last clause of the Bill came to a division. But the whole eight days, nevertheless, were filled with the new permutations and combinations which Tressady had foreseen. The Government carried the Stepney election, and in other quarters the effects of the speechmaking in the North began to be visible. Rumours of the syndicate already formed to take over large numbers of workshops in both the Jewish and Gentile quarters of the East End, and of the hours and wages that were likely to obtain in the new factories, were driving a considerable mass of working-class opinion, which had hitherto held aloof, straight for the Government, and splitting up much of that which had been purely hostile. Nevertheless, the situation in the House itself was hardly changing with the change in the country. The Socialist members very soon developed the proposal to make the landlords responsible for the carrying-out of the new Act into a furious general attack on the landlords of London. Their diatribes kept up the terrors which had already cost the Government so many men. It was not possible, not seemly, to yield, as Maxwell was yielding, all along the line to these fellows! But the Old Liberals, or the New Whigs, as George had expected, were restless. They felt the country, and they had no affection for landlords as such. Did a man arise who could give them a lead, there was no saying how soon they might not break away from the Fontenoy combination. Fontenoy felt it, and prowled among them like a Satan, urging them to complete their deed, to give the _coup de grace_.