already surrounded by a group of friends and acquaintances, and was
evidently being made the recipient of a salvo of congratulation--
presumably on his recent performances in the Foreign Office debate,
Comus concluded. But Youghal himself seemed to be announcing the
event with which the congratulations were connected. Had some
dramatic catastrophe overtaken the Government, Comus wondered. And
then, as he pressed nearer, a chance word, the coupling of two
names, told him the news.



CHAPTER XI



After the momentous lunch at the Corridor Restaurant Elaine had
returned to Manchester Square (where she was staying with one of
her numerous aunts) in a frame of mind that embraced a tangle of
competing emotions. In the first place she was conscious of a
dominant feeling of relief; in a moment of impetuosity, not wholly
uninfluenced by pique, she had settled the problem which hours of
hard thinking and serious heart-searching had brought no nearer to
solution, and, although she felt just a little inclined to be
scared at the headlong manner of her final decision, she had now
very little doubt in her own mind that the decision had been the
right one. In fact the wonder seemed rather that she should have
been so long in doubt as to which of her wooers really enjoyed her
honest approval. She had been in love, these many weeks past with
an imaginary Comus, but now that she had definitely walked out of
her dreamland she saw that nearly all the qualities that had