A generation earlier, Lester's father had been a brother officer of Sir
Wilfrid's, in days when the Lester family was still rich, and before the
crashing failure of the great banking-house of the name.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the House of Commons, Lady Coryston had
been sitting pleasantly absorbed, watching her son, who lay now like a man
relieved, lolling on the half-empty bench, chatting to a friend beside him.
His voice was still in her ears: mingled with the memory of other voices
from old, buried times. For more than twenty years how familiar had she
been with this political scene!--these galleries and benches, crowded or
listless; these opposing Cabinets--the Ins and Outs--on either side of the
historic table; the glitter of the Mace at its farther end; the books, the
old morocco boxes, the tops of the official wigs, the ugly light which
bathed it all; the exhausted air, the dreariness, the boredom! all
worth while, these last, just for the moments, the crises, the play of
personalities, the conflict of giants, of which they were the inevitable
conditions. There, on the second bench above the gangway on the Tory
side, her husband, before he succeeded to the title, had sat through four
Parliaments. And from the same point of vantage above she had watched him
year after year, coming in and out, speaking occasionally, never eloquent
or brilliant, but always respected; a good, worthy, steady-going fellow
with whom no one had any fault to find, least of all his wife, to whom he
had very easily given up the management of their common life, while he
represented her political opinions in Parliament much more than his own.

Until--until?

Well, until in an evil hour, a great question, the only political question
on which he differed and had always differed from his wife, on which he
felt he _must_ speak for himself and stand on his own feet, arose to