Lady Niton, who had given him one inky finger--(a pile of letters just completed lay beside her)--shook her head, looking him critically up and down the while. The critical eye, however, was more required in her own case. She was untidily dressed, as usual, in a shabby black gown; her brown "front" was a little displaced, and her cap awry; and her fingers had apparently been badly worsted in a struggle with her pen. Yet her diminutive figure in the drawing-room--such is the power of personality--made a social place of it at once. "I obeyed your summons," Bobbie continued, "though I'm sure Lady Lucy didn't want to invite me with all this hubbub going on. Well, what do you prophesy? They told me at the station that the result would be out by two o'clock. I very nearly went to the Town Hall, but the fact is everybody's so nervous I funked it. If Oliver's kicked out, the fewer tears over spilled milk the better." "He won't be kicked out." "Don't make too sure! I have been hearing the most dismal reports. The Ferrierites hate him much worse than if he'd gone against them openly. And the fellows he really agrees with don't love him much better." "All the same he will get in; and if he don't get office now he will in a few years." "Oliver must be flattered that you believe in him so." "I don't believe in him at all," said Lady Niton, sharply. "Every country has the politicians it deserves." Bobbie grinned. "I don't find you a democrat yet." "I'm just as much of one as anybody in this house, for all their fine talk. Only they pretend to like being governed by their plumbers and gas-fitters, and I don't." "I hear that Oliver's speeches have been extremely good." "H'm--all about the poor," said Lady Niton, releasing her hand from the knitting-needles, and waving it scornfully at the room in which they sat. "Well, if Oliver were to tell me from now till doomsday that his heart bled for the poor, I shouldn't believe him. It doesn't bleed. He is as comfortable in his middle region as you or I." Bobbie laughed. "Now look here, I'm simply famished for gossip, and I must have it." Lady Niton's ball of wool fell on the floor. Bobbie pounced upon it, and put it in his pocket. "A hostage! Surrender--and talk to me! Do you belong to the Mallory faction--or don't you?" "Give me my ball, sir--and don't dare to mention that girl's name in this house." Bobbie opened his eyes. "I say!--what did you mean by writing to me like that if you weren't on the right side?" "What do you mean?" "You can't have gone over to Lady Lucy and the Fotheringham woman!" Lady Niton looked at him with a queer expression of contempt in her tanned and crumpled face. "Is that the only reason you can imagine for my not permitting you to talk of Diana Mallory in this house?" Bobbie, looked puzzled. Then a light broke. "I see! You mean the house isn't good enough? Precisely! What's up. Alicia? _No_!" Lady Niton laughed.