He found it the easiest thing in the world to get an ideal President, Vice-President, Honorary Secretary and Committee. They were all men whom he could implicitly trust to abstain from thought on any vexed question, but he took care that no question of this type remained in a condition of suspense: he himself supplied the thinking power necessary for its solution. The result of several years’ adherence to this system was that Ernest Clifton, without a seat in Parliament, without a name that carried weight with it outside his own Party, had become a Power in the political world. It was rumoured that upon one occasion he had been consulted by the Prime Minister in regard to a matter involving a considerable change in the domestic policy of the Government, and that his counsel had been accepted although it differed materially from the view of some important members of the Cabinet. It was this Ernest Clifton who, after dictating to his private secretary half a dozen letters of a more or less ambiguous phraseology, sat with a letter of his own in front of him--a letter which he had received that morning--a letter which added in no inconsiderable degree to his burden of thought. The letter was from Josephine West and it notified to him the fact that the writer found it impossible any longer to maintain the policy of secrecy which he had imposed upon her. “When I agreed for your sake to keep our engagement a secret,” Josephine wrote, “I did not foresee the difficulties in the situation which that secrecy has already created. Daily I feel myself to be in a false position, and hourly I feel humiliated by the consciousness of being concerned in an underhand act. I know that I was wrong in giving you my promise at first; there was really no reason why you should not have gone to my father and if he refused his consent we should be placed in no worse position than that of numbers of other men and women who are separated by cruel circumstances, but are still happy relying on each other’s fidelity. Surely we could bear up by the same means, against a much greater adversity than the refusal of my father to give his consent to our engagement being made public. I must therefore ask of you, my dear Ernest, to release me from the promise which I made to you--to release me nominally is all that I beg of you--until my father has given his consent to our engagement. Of course I need hardly say to you who know me so well, that your releasing me would not interfere with my present affection which is quite unchanged and not likely to change. But I must be released.” This was the part of the letter which added so materially to his burden of thought, though the letter really could not be said to go more than a little step in advance of the situation created by the writer by her interview with him at Ranelagh, a fortnight ago.