“I thought she was a passion of yours,” said Barbara in faint surprise. “You made me go to her wedding, when I hardly knew her.” “At O’Rane’s request: because her father was being so difficult.” There was a pause; then Barbara shrugged her shoulders. “I think she’s rather in love with you,” she murmured. “That’s very flattering,” I said, “but it doesn’t make things any easier. Her affections are quickly aroused. First it was Eric, then Gaymer; now . . .” “You don’t believe it? George, you’re sometimes rather unobservant. Why d’you think she came _here_ of all places?” “I should think she was banking on the softness of your heart or of my head,” I answered. I hardly knew whether to be surprised or not when I found Ivy still with us next day, but I made no further attempt to dislodge her. At the end of the week Barbara went to Crawleigh and I telephoned for a room at the Eclectic Club. New developments in Ireland kept me tied to the office at the last moment; and I did not choose that my wife or Ivy’s husband should be able to say that the two of us had been alone together. After four-and-twenty hours’ solitude Ivy discovered that it was possible to live in an hotel without being tracked by her drunken and homicidal lord; and the incident closed when Barbara came into my room, on the night of her return from the Abbey, with a brief letter of thanks. “You’d get tired of her very soon,” she said judicially, as though I still needed to be saved from myself. “So would any man. That’s why I begged Eric not to marry her. I believe you’d be happier, though, if you found some woman who really interested you.” “That advice is more suitable for a bachelor than for a married man,” I pointed out. Barbara walked to the door in silence, then paused with her fingers on the handle. “And how long is this going on?,” she asked with a sigh of utter exhaustion. “You alone can say that,” I replied. The tragic farce had been running for six months and was to run for another eighteen before the farce was eliminated and only the tragedy remained. Without regular employment, I should have gone out of my mind; and I am thankful that my uncle’s increasing infirmities threw ever more and more of our work on my shoulders. It was in the spring of 1921 that he despaired openly and finally of the existing government; it was in the summer that he called for a change. “Though, mark you, there’s not another man who could have done what George has!,” cried Bertrand with the generous appreciation that Jack Sheppard might have exhibited towards Dick Turpin. “After two years of power he’s made a tumbledown peace that satisfies no one. He _hasn’t_ hanged the kaiser; he _hasn’t_ made Germany pay for the war. The League of Nations, which we were promised, _isn’t_ functioning; he calls a new conference every few weeks to settle finally the problems which were finally settled at Versailles. If that isn’t an achievement . . .”