"Of course there is!" said Bobbie, hotly. "Marsham isn't such a fool as not to know that. Why did he let this aggressive young woman take such a prominent part?" Lankester shrugged his shoulders, but did not pursue the subject. The two men went up-stairs, and Lankester parted from his companion with the remark: "I must say I hope Marsham won't press for anything in the Government. I don't believe he'll ever get in for this place again." Forbes shook his head. "Marsham's got a lot of devil in him somewhere. I shouldn't wonder if this made him set his teeth." * * * * * Lankester opened the door of the ugly yet luxurious room which had been assigned him. He looked round it with fresh distaste, resenting its unnecessary size and its pretentious decoration, resenting also the very careful valeting which had evidently been bestowed on his shabby clothes and personal appointments, as though the magnificent young footman who looked after him had been doing his painful best with impossible materials. "Why, the idiots have shut the windows!" He strode vehemently across the floor, only to find the park outside, as he hung across the sill, even less to his liking than the room within. Then, throwing himself into a chair, tired out with the canvassing, speaking, and multifarious business of the preceding days, he fell to wondering what on earth had made him--after the fatigues of his own election--come down to help Marsham with his. There were scores of men in the House he liked a great deal better, and requests for help had been showered upon him. He had, no doubt, been anxious, as a keen member of the advanced group, that Marsham should finally commit himself to the programme of the Left Wing, with which he had been so long coquetting. Oliver had a considerable position in the House, and was, moreover, a rich man. Rich men had not, so far, been common in the advanced section of the party. Lankester, in whom the idealist and the wire-puller were shrewdly mixed, was well aware that the reforms he desired could only be got by extensive organization; and he knew precisely what the money cost of getting them would be. Rich men, therefore, were the indispensable tools of his ideas; and among his own group he who had never possessed a farthing of his own apart from the earnings of his brain and pen was generally set on to capture them. Was that really why he had come down?--to make sure of this rich Laodicean? Lankester fell into a reverie.