"Well scored! I wish I had a wife to play these strokes for me. I shall argue that a keen politician has no right to be generous. He is at war." Kitty took no notice. She leaned her little chin on her hand, and her eyes perused the face of her companion. "Where have you been--all the time--before America?" "In the deserts--fighting devils," said Cliffe, after a moment. "What does that mean?" she asked, wondering. "Read my new book. That will tell you about the deserts." "And the devils?" "Ah, I keep them to myself." "Do you?" she said, softly. "I have just read your poems over again." Cliffe gave a slight start, then looked indifferent. "Have you? But they were written three years ago. Dieu merci, one finds new devils like new acquaintances." She shook her head. "What do you mean?" he asked her, half amused, half arrested. "They are always the old," she said, in a low voice. Their eyes met. In hers was the same veiled, restless melancholy as in his own. Together with the dazzling air of youth that surrounded her, the cherished, flattered, luxurious existence that she and her house suggested, they made a strange impression upon him. "Does she mean me to understand that she is not happy?" he thought to himself. But the next moment she was engaged in a merry chatter with the Dean, and all trace of the mood she had thus momentarily shown him had vanished. Half-way through the luncheon, Ashe came in. He appeared, fresh and smiling, irreproachably dressed, and showing no trace whatever of the hard morning of official work he had just passed through, nor of the many embarrassments which, as every one knew, were weighing on the Foreign Office. The Dean, with his keen sense for the dramatic, watched the meeting between him and Cliffe with some closeness, having in mind the almost personal duel between the two men--a duel of letters, telegrams, or speeches, which had been lately carried on in the sight of Europe and America. For Ashe now represented the Foreign Office in the House of Commons, and had been much badgered by the Tory extremists who followed Cliffe. Naturally, being Englishmen, they met as though nothing had happened and they had parted the day before in Pall Mall. A "Hullo, Ashe!" and "Hullo, Cliffe! glad to see you back again," completed the matter. The Dean enjoyed it as a specimen of English "phlegm," recalling with amusement his last visit to the Paris of the Second Empire--Paris torn between government and opposition, the _salons_ of the one divided from the _salons_ of the other by a sulphurous gulf, unless when some Lazarus of the moment, some well-known novelist or poet, cradled in the Abraham's bosom of Liberalism, passed amid shrieks of triumph or howls of treason into the official inferno.