To Chalfont, Parliament stood as a mere talking shop in which a number of uninspired egotists schemed and struggled in order to cling to office and salaries while the rest answered to the crack of the party whip and used whatever influence they had for self-advertisement,—commercializing the letters which they had bought the right to place against their names. He detested the place and the people it sheltered and regarded it as a great sham, a sepulchre of misplaced hopes and broken promises. But to Lola, who walked silently at his side, it symbolized the struggles of Fallaray, stood dignified and with a beautiful sky line as the building in which that man might some day take his place as the inspired leader of a bewildered and a patient country. And as she walked along on the pavement which had been worn by the passing of many feet, glancing from time to time at the water over which a pageant of history had passed, her heart swelled and her love seemed to throw a little white light round her head. Was it so absurd, so grotesque, that she should have in a sort of way grown up for and given herself to this man who had only seen her once and probably forgotten her existence? Sometimes it seemed to her not only to be absurd and grotesque but impudent,—she, the daughter of the Breezys of Queen’s Road, Bayswater, the maid who put waves into the wiry bobbed hair of an irresponsible lady of fashion, and who, from time to time, masqueraded in the great city under the name of a relative long since dead and forgotten. Nevertheless, a tiny figure at the side of Chalfont, her soul flowered at that moment and she knew that she would very willingly be burnt at the stake like Joan of Arc if, by so doing, she could rub away from Fallaray’s face even one or two of the lines of loneliness which life had put upon it.