He walked on like a man in a dream. He left the busy harbors and the great trade-routes behind him. The stately procession of vessels receded and now he saw only one--a little, full-rigged, black-hulled ship quite alone on a silent sea, the _Perhaps_, reeling down with all her canvas drawing, from her sky-sail to her spanker, reeling down with the water breaking from her broad stern bows into the mists of the south. The picture was so vivid in his mind that he could see the brightness of the binnacle and the wheel spinning in the helmsman's hands. He paused again to consider why, and paused with a curious sense of comfort. Once before, on the occasion of his maiden speech, the vision of a ship had risen before his eyes. But then it was fear which had evoked the picture. He had longed to be safely upon its bridge doing the thing he knew how to do. Now he had no such fear. He was nervous, but he had no desire to run away, he had no terror that the necessary words would fail him, he had no longing to stand upon the deck of the _Perhaps_. He was strung up for the contest of the afternoon. He walked slowly on and turned in at the gate of Palace Yard, and still the _Perhaps_ fled southward before his eyes. CHAPTER XXIX IN THE LADIES' GALLERY An hour later Cynthia drove down to the House of Commons, anxious and yet expectant of triumph. For on this afternoon Harry Rames should particularly excel; the occasion was so confederate with his gifts. In debate he was as yet too inexperienced to shine with any brilliancy. His success had been made with prepared speeches. He had not as yet the art to handle words with such precision that he could express vividly in an argument across the floor just what he meant, and no more and no less. He was not at ease with his vocabulary when a sudden call was made upon it, and his lack of ease became manifest and spread, as it always does, discomfort. He was in a word on the way to becoming a polished debater but as yet he was at school. This afternoon, however, he had not to reply, not to intervene in the middle of a discussion; his business was to make the set speech which set the debate going. And here he was on his own good ground. He could prepare the vivid phrase and, a quality perhaps still more important, he could speak it. He had an invaluable gift which had stood him in good stead when he had delivered his maiden speech. He was able so to deliver a carefully concocted speech as to give the impression that he was thinking aloud. He gained his effect by an apt breaking off of sentences and a recommencement, by a sudden drop to the homeliest of colloquialisms, by a seeming deliberation in the choice of his words, so that the picturesque and living sentence, which had been so carefully thought out, appeared to leap new-minted from a furnace of conviction. He had been shrewd enough to recognize with his own