My earlier whisperings of jealousy were silenced by her utter forlornness. I did not care whether her thoughts and affection and heart and soul were his, so long as I could take the look of pain out of her eyes. I wanted to tell her that I understood and was sorry for her; but the name had roused her, and she stood up with languid dignity: “Yes.” . . . She was once again the alert and vigilant hostess of an hour before. “I thought it would look so terribly rude if he came here and found no one to receive him. After I’d specially asked him, too,” she added on a higher note. Then her self-possession returned to her. “It’s two o’clock. As he hasn’t come now, I suppose . . . he’s not coming . . . at all.” . . . 4 If “the historian of the future”, whom I have already invoked, have the microscopic vision and the titanic industry with which his predecessors credit him, I believe he must find space for a footnote, in brilliant, to describe our share in forming a critical opposition during the last four months of the armistice. In the days immediately following the 1918 election, the government had hardly an enemy; in the months after the peace-treaty was signed, it had hardly a friend. Even before the _Economic Consequences of the Peace_, even before the mutual vituperation of the allies, an independent mood of questioning and doubt succeeded to the hysterical assertions and demands of the mad election. How far we fostered that mood by means of open propaganda and private suggestion, how far we made articulate a frame of mind that was already struggling to express itself, I cannot say; but that the mood became contagious cannot be challenged. In these first spring days, Barbara’s circumspect cousin, Lord John Carstairs, avoided our house for fear of finding himself described as a ‘defeatist’, a friend of the enemy, a creature of Caillaux or a hireling of Stinnes. By the end of the summer, an alert opportunist such as Sir Rupert Foreditch sought publicity in the columns of _Peace_ or opened his campaign by an attack on Seymour Street because our paper was frank and fearless and because “the Oakleigh gang”, as we were unflatteringly called, was too important and, in time, too numerous to be ignored. On the morrow of the inaugural dinner, Bertrand hunted me out of doors to study “the great movement of men”, while he plotted with Barbara new days of keeping me on the run. No reference was made to our pitiful encounter at the stair-head; but I left a note to say that she was not to be called, and, when I carried in her breakfast, she looked up—with the eloquent silence of a dog—to thank me for understanding and to shew that she too understood. At once, after that, she began to discuss the party of the night before.