A minute later Oliver stood meditating in his own room, where he had just donned his smoking-jacket. By one of the natural ironies of life, at a moment when he was more in love than he had ever been yet, he was, nevertheless, thinking eagerly of prospects and of money. Owing to his peculiar relation to his mother, and his father's estate, marriage would be to him no mere satisfaction of a personal passion. It would be a vital incident in a politician's career, to whom larger means and greater independence were now urgently necessary. To marry with his mother's full approval would at last bring about that provision for himself which his father's will had most unjustly postponed. He was monstrously dependent upon her. It had been one of the chief checks on a strong and concentrated ambition. But Lady Lucy had long made him understand that to marry according to her wishes would mean emancipation: a much larger income in the present, and the final settlement of her will in his favor. It was amazing how she had taken to Diana! Diana had only to accept him, and his future was secured. But though thoughts of this kind passed in tumultuous procession through the grooves of consciousness, they were soon expelled by others. Marsham was no mere interested schemer. Diana should help him to his career; but above all and before all she was the adorable brown-eyed creature, whose looks had just been shining upon him, whose soft hand had just been lingering in his! As he stood alone and spellbound in the dark, yielding himself to the surging waves of feeling which broke over his mind, the thought, the dream, of holding Diana Mallory in his arms--of her head against his breast--came upon him with a sudden and stinging delight. Yet the delight was under control--the control of a keen and practical intelligence. There rose in him a sharp sense of the unfathomed depths and possibilities in such a nature as Diana's. Once or twice that evening, through all her sweet forthcomingness, when he had forced the note a little, she had looked at him in sudden surprise or shrinking. No!--nothing premature! It seemed to him, as it had seemed to Bobbie Forbes, that she could only be won by the slow and gradual conquest of a rich personality. He set himself to the task. * * * * * Down-stairs Mr. Ferrier and Sir James Chide were sitting together in a remote corner of the hall. Mr. Ferrier, in great good-humor with the state of things, was discussing Oliver's chances, confidentially, with his old friend. Sir James sat smoking in silence. He listened to Ferrier's praises of Miss Mallory, to his generous appreciation of Marsham's future, to his speculations as to what Lady Lucy would do for her son, upon his marriage, or as to the part which a creature so brilliant and so winning as Diana might be expected to play in London and in political life.