steadily with Fontenoy all through. His election speeches pledged him
head over ears."

"Oh! of course he will vote," said Marcella, moving a little uneasily;
"but one cannot help trying to modify his way of looking at things. And
his tone _is_ changed."

Maxwell stood at the foot of her sofa, considering, a host of perplexed
and unwelcome notions flitting across his mind. In spite of his idealist
absorption in his work, his political aims, and the one love of his
life, he had the training of a man of the world, and could summon the
shrewdness of one when he pleased. He had liked this young Tressady, for
the first time, at Castle Luton, and had seen him fall under Marcella's
charm with some amusement. But this haunting of their camp in the East
End, at such a marked and critical moment, was strange, to say the least
of it. It must point, one would think, to some sudden and remarkable
strength of personal influence.

Had she any real consciousness of the power she wielded? Once or twice,
in the years since they had been married, Maxwell had watched this spell
of his wife's at work, and had known a moment of trouble. "If I were the
fellow she had talked and walked with so," he had once said to himself,
"I must have fallen in love with her had she been twenty times another
man's wife!" Yet no harm had happened; he had only reproached himself for
a gross mind without daring to breathe a word to her.

And he dared not now. Besides, how absurd! The young man was just
married, and, to Maxwell's absent, incurious eyes, the bride had seemed a
lively, pretty little person enough. No doubt it was the nervous strain
of his political life that made such fancies possible to him. Let him not