"People who insist on making friends with other people who didn't at the beginning want to be friends at all, haven't the right afterward to drop being friends calmly, without a word of explanation. Of course, if people are bored--but even then they should have guessed they were going to be bored before they perhaps made other people count a little--oh, not so much, of course, but just a little--on their friendship. No, I object to that. It's hateful--and then you saunter in as if--No." Cynthia, oppressed with a sense of utter isolation in a most neglectful world, which probably hated her when it stopped to think of her at all, was perilously near to tears. She took refuge in sarcasm of a crude kind: "You probably wouldn't understand that suddenly to stay away after you have been friendly is rather humiliating to a girl. But you will take it from me, won't you, that it is so?" She spoke as one giving a kindly lesson in tact to a boorish person. But her lips shook. Harry Rames rose from his chair and crossing the room took up the _Times_ which lay still neatly folded in its original square upon a table. "You have not opened your paper to-day," he said; and once more he saw Cynthia flinch as though he had struck her a blow--flinch and sit dumb, with her great eyes full of pain. "Oh, please don't make any mistake," he said quickly, and with the newspaper in his hand he came back to her side. "I wasn't taking what you said carelessly. But if you had read your _Times_ to-day you would have understood, I think, why I have stayed away till now. You might, perhaps, have guessed why I have come this afternoon." Cynthia took the newspaper from him and unfolded it, with her eyes resting in doubt upon his. Then comprehension came to her. She turned the pages quickly and stopped at one particular sheet of closely printed columns. "Oh," she cried, "you have made your maiden speech." "Yes, last night." In a second her resentment was forgotten. She was all smiles. She reached out an eager hand to him. "It was successful? But why do I ask? I have watched the newspapers ever since the House met. I thought you were never going to speak." "I always meant to hold back at the beginning," said the wise Harry Rames. "There were new men tumbling over one another to speak on the address; I let them get that start of me without any fear. I wanted to learn the way of speaking which carries you home in the House of Commons." Cynthia laughed and made room for him on the sofa at her side. "Yes, there I recognize you." "Besides," Rames continued, "the address fights the election over again, sums it up, and parades its consequences--consequences already known to all. It's very difficult to make any real mark in the debate on the address. So while the other men talked I sat quiet. Night after night through the address, through the two months which followed it, I sat in the House, listening and watching. And I learned my lesson." "Yes?" said Cynthia.