moon Isabel is well-behaved. . . .!"

Except for these attacks I do not remember much of the conversation
at table; it was, I know, discursive and concerned with the sort of
topographical and social and electioneering fact natural to such a
visit. Old Rivers struck me as a delightful person, modestly
unconscious of his doubly-earned V. C. and the plucky defence of
Kardin-Bergat that won his baronetcy. He was that excellent type,
the soldier radical, and we began that day a friendship that was
only ended by his death in the hunting-field three years later. He
interested Margaret into a disregard of my plate and the fact that I
had secured the illegal indulgence of Moselle. After lunch we went
for coffee into another low room, this time brown panelled and
looking through French windows on a red-walled garden, graceful even
in its winter desolation. And there the conversation suddenly
picked up and became good. It had fallen to a pause, and the
doctor, with an air of definitely throwing off a mask and wrecking
an established tranquillity, remarked: "Very probably you Liberals
will come in, though I'm not sure you'll come in so mightily as you
think, but what you do when you do come in passes my comprehension."

"There's good work sometimes," said Sir Graham, "in undoing."

"You can't govern a great empire by amending and repealing the Acts
of your predecessors," said the doctor.

There came that kind of pause that happens when a subject is
broached too big and difficult for the gathering. Margaret's blue
eyes regarded the speaker with quiet disapproval for a moment, and
then came to me in the not too confident hope that I would snub him