in the way of tips and gifts--the kindnesses she had been showing during
the last three days to the American girl. Too kind! Insipidity lay that
way.

Manisty returned to his newspapers. When he had finished them he got up and
began to pace the stone terrace, his great head bent forward as usual, as
though the weight of it were too much for the shoulders. The newspapers had
made him restless again, had dissipated the good humour of the morning,
born perhaps of the mere April warmth and _bien etre_.

'Idling in a villa--with two women'--he said to himself, bitterly--'while
all these things are happening.'

For the papers were full of news--of battles lost and won, on questions
with which he had been at one time intimately concerned. Once or twice in
the course of these many columns he had found his own name, his own opinion
quoted, but only as belonging to a man who had left the field--a man of the
past--politically dead.

As he stood there with his hands upon his sides, looking out over the Alban
Lake, and its broom-clad sides, a great hunger for London swept suddenly
upon him, for the hot scent of its streets, for its English crowd, for
the look of its shops and clubs and parks. He had a vision of the club
writing-room--of well-known men coming in and going out--discussing the
news of the morning, the gossip of the House--he saw himself accosted
as one of the inner circle,--he was sensible again of those short-lived
pleasures of power and office. Not that he had cared half as much for these
pleasures, when he had them, as other men. To affirm with him meant to be
already half way on the road to doubt; contradiction was his character.
Nevertheless, now that he was out of it, alone and forgotten--now that the