Nobodys Man | Page 7

you to take up such a pursuit when you have finished your
work."
"Fifteen thousand intelligent voters have just done their best to tell me
that it is already finished," he sighed.
She made a little grimace.
"Am I going to be disappointed in you, I wonder?" she asked. "I don't
think so. You surely wouldn't let a little affair like one election drive
you out of public life? It was so obvious that you were made the victim
for Horlock's growing unpopularity in the country. Haven't you realised
that yourself--or perhaps you don't care to talk about these things to an
ignoramus such as I am?"
"Please don't believe that," he begged hastily. "I think yours is really
the common-sense view of the matter. Only," he went on, "I have
always represented, amongst the coalitionists, the moderate Socialist,

the views of those men who recognise the power and force of the
coming democracy, and desire to have legislation attuned to it. Yet it
was the Democratic vote which upset me at Hellesfield."
"That was entirely a matter of faction," she persisted. "That horrible
person Miller was sent down there, for some reason or other, to make
trouble. I believe if the election had been delayed another week, and
you had been able to make two more speeches like you did at the Corn
Exchange, you would have got in."
He looked at her in some surprise.
"That is exactly what I thought myself," he agreed. "How on earth do
you come to know all these things?"
"I take an interest in your career," she said, smiling at him, "and I hate
to see you so dejected without cause."
He felt a little thrill at her words. A queer new sense of companionship
stirred in his pulses. The bitterness of his suppressed disappointment
was suddenly soothed. There was something of the excitement of the
discoverer, too, in these new sensations. It seemed to him that he was
finding something which had been choked out of his life and which was
yet a real and natural part of it.
"You will make an awful nuisance of me if you don't mind," he warned
her. "If you encourage me like this, you will develop the most juvenile
of all failings--you will make me want to talk about myself. I am
beginning to feel terribly egotistical already."
She leaned a little towards him. Her mouth was soft with sweet and
feminine tenderness, her eyes warm with kindness.
"That is just what I hoped I might succeed in doing," she declared. "I
have been interested in your career ever since I had the faintest idea of
what politics meant. You could not give me a greater happiness than to
talk to me--about yourself."

CHAPTER III
Very soon tea was brought in. The homely service of the meal, and
Robert's plain clothes, seemed to demand some sort of explanation. It
was she who provided the opening.
"Will your wife be long away?" she enquired.
Tallente looked at his guest thoughtfully. She was pouring out tea from
an ordinary brown earthenware pot with an air of complete absorption
in her task. The friendliness of her seemed somehow to warm the
atmosphere of the room, even as her sympathy had stolen into the
frozen places of his life. For the moment he ignored her question. His
eyes appraised her critically, reminiscently. There was something
vaguely familiar in the frank sweetness of her tone and manner.
"I am going to make the most idiotically commonplace remark," he
said. "I cannot believe that this is the first time we have met."
"It isn't," she replied, helping herself to strawberry
"Are you in earnest?" he asked, puzzled.
"Do you mean that I have spoken to you?"
"Absolutely!"
"Not only that but you have made me a present."
He searched the recesses of his memory in vain. She smiled at his
perplexity and began to count on her fingers.
"Let me see," she said, "exactly fourteen years ago you arrived in Paris
from London on a confidential mission to a certain person."
"To Lord Peters!" he exclaimed.
She nodded.

"You had half an hour to spare after you had finished your business,
and you begged to see the young people. Maggie Peters was always a
friend of yours. You came into the morning-room and I was there."
"You?"
"Yes! I was at school in Paris, and I was spending my half-holiday with
Maggie."
"The little brown girl!" he murmured. "I never heard your name, and
when I sent the chocolates I had to send them to 'the young lady in
brown.' Of course I remember! But your hair was down your back, you
had freckles, and you were as silent as a mouse."
"You see how much better my memory is than yours," she