immediately exclaimed to me: "I've seen him, you know--I've seen him!" She told me about Saltram's call. "And how did you find him?" "Oh, so strange!" "You didn't like him?" "I can't tell till I see him again." "You want to do that?" She was silent a moment. "Immensely." We stopped; I fancied she had become aware Gravener was looking at us. She turned back toward the knot of the others, and I said: "Dislike him as much as you will--I see you're bitten." "Bitten?" I thought she coloured a little. "Oh, it doesn't matter!" I laughed; "one doesn't die of it." "I hope I sha'n't die of anything before I've seen more of Mrs. Mulville." I rejoiced with her over plain Adelaide, whom she pronounced the loveliest woman she had met in England; but before we separated I remarked to her that it was an act of mere humanity to warn her that if she should see more of Frank Saltram (which would be likely to follow on any increase of acquaintance with Mrs. Mulville), she might find herself flattening her nose against the clear hard pane of an eternal question--that of the relative importance of virtue. She replied that this was surely a subject on which one took everything for granted; whereupon I admitted that I had perhaps expressed myself ill. What I referred to was what I had referred to the night we met in Upper Baker Street--the importance relative (relative to virtue) of other gifts. She asked me if I called virtue a gift--as if it were handed to us in a parcel on our birthday; and I declared that this very question showed me the problem had already caught her by the skirt. She would have help however, help that I myself had once had, in resisting its tendency to make one cross. "What help do you mean?" "That of the member for Clockborough." She stared, smiled, then exclaimed: "Why, my idea has been to help _him_!" She _had_ helped him--I had his own word for it that at Clockborough her bedevilment of the voters had really put him in. She would do so doubtless again and again, but I heard the very next month that this fine faculty had undergone a temporary eclipse. News of the catastrophe first came to me from Mrs. Saltram, and it was afterwards confirmed at Wimbledon: poor Miss Anvoy was in trouble--great disasters, in America, had suddenly summoned her home. Her father, in New York, had had reverses--lost so much money that no one knew what mightn't yet come of it. It was Adelaide who told me that she had gone off, alone, at less than a week's notice. "Alone? Gravener has permitted that?" "What will you have? The House of Commons?"