"When they get it back!" Nick replied, turning round and looking for his hat. "It's startlingly late; you must be tired." Mrs. Dallow made no response to this, and he pursued his quest, successful only when he reached a duskier corner of the room, to which the hat had been relegated by his cousin's maid. "Mr. Carteret will expect so much if he pays. And so would you." "Yes, I'm bound to say I should! I should expect a great deal--everything." And Mrs. Dallow emphasised this assertion by the way she rose erect. "If you're riding for a fall, if you're only going in to miss it, you had better stay out." "How can I miss it with _you_?" the young man smiled. She uttered a word, impatiently but indistinguishably, and he continued: "And even if I do it will have been immense fun." "It is immense fun," said Julia. "But the best fun is to win. If you don't----!" "If I don't?" he repeated as she dropped. "I'll never speak to you again." "How much you expect even when you don't pay!" Mrs. Dallow's rejoinder was a justification of this remark, expressing as it did the fact that should they receive on the morrow information on which she believed herself entitled to count, information tending to show how hard the Conservatives meant to fight, she should look to him to be in the field as early as herself. Sunday was a lost day; she should leave Paris on Monday. "Oh they'll fight it hard; they'll put up Kingsbury," said Nick, smoothing his hat. "They'll all come down--all that can get away. And Kingsbury has a very handsome wife." "She's not so handsome as your cousin," Julia smiled. "Oh dear, no--a cousin sooner than a wife any day!" Nick laughed as soon as he had said this, as if the speech had an awkward side; but the reparation perhaps scarcely mended it, the exaggerated mock-meekness with which he added: "I'll do any blessed thing you tell me." "Come here to-morrow then--as early as ten." She turned round, moving to the door with him; but before they reached it she brought out: "Pray isn't a gentleman to do anything, to be anything?" "To be anything----?" "If he doesn't aspire to serve the State." "Aspire to make his political fortune, do you mean? Oh bless me, yes, there are other things." "What other things that can compare with that?" "Well, I for instance, I'm very fond of the arts." "Of the arts?" she echoed. "Did you never hear of them? I'm awfully fond of painting." At this Julia stopped short, and her fine grey eyes had for a moment the air of being set further forward in her head. "Don't be odious! Good-night," she said, turning away and leaving him to go. BOOK SECOND VII