Nothing was wanting to the simplicity of her quiet assent. “A very lone woman.” Her face, for a moment, had the vision of a long distance. “My loneliness is great enough to want something big to hold it--and my taste good enough to want something beautiful. You see, I had your picture.” Yule’s innocence made a movement. “Mine?” Her smile reassured him; she nodded toward the main entrance. “A water colour I chanced on in Boston.” “In Boston?” She stared. “Haven’t you heard of Boston either?” “Yes--but what has Boston heard of _me_?” “It wasn’t ‘you,’ unfortunately--it was your divine south front. The drawing struck me so that I got you up--in the books.” He appeared, however, rather comically, but half to make it out, or to gather at any rate that there was even more of it than he feared. “Are we in the books?” “Did you never discover it?” Before his blankness, the dim apprehension in his fine amused and troubled face of how much there was of it, her frank, gay concern for him sprang again to the front. “Where in heaven’s name, Captain Yule, have _you_ come over from?” He looked at her very kindly, but as if scarce expecting her to follow. “The East End of London.” She had followed perfectly, he saw the next instant, but she had by no means equally accepted. “What were you doing there?” He could only put it, though a little over-consciously, very simply. “Working, you see. When I left the army--it was much too slow, unless one was personally a whirlwind of war--I began to make out that, for a fighting man----” “There’s always,” she took him up, “somebody or other to go for?” He considered her, while he smoked, with more confidence; as if she might after all understand. “The enemy, yes--everywhere in force. I went for _him_: misery and ignorance and vice--injustice and privilege and wrong. Such as you see me----” “You’re a rabid reformer?”--she understood beautifully. “I wish we had you at Missoura Top!” He literally, for a moment, in the light of her beauty and familiarity, appeared to measure his possible use there; then, looking round him again, announced with a sigh that, predicament for predicament, his own would do. “I fear my work is nearer home. I hope,” he continued, “since you’re so good as to seem to care, to perform a part of that work in the next House of Commons. My electors have wanted me----” “And you’ve wanted _them_,” she lucidly put in, “and that has been why you couldn’t come down.” “Yes, for all this last time. And before that, from my childhood up, there was another reason.” He took a few steps away and brought it out as rather a shabby one. “A family feud.”