“Oh, she’s going to break it off unless we all assure her that we find him brainy,” Madge explained with a laugh. “It seems her father wasn’t brainy and her mother was. Or else it was the other way about: I’m not quite sure. But whichever it was, it led to ructions. Myself, if he’s at all possible and seems to care for her, I intend to find him brilliant.” A figure was loitering the other side of the street when she reached home. She thought she somehow recognized it, and crossed over. It was McKean, smoking his everlasting pipe. Success having demanded some such change, he had migrated to “The Albany,” and she had not seen him for some time. He had come to have a last look at the house—in case it might happen to be the last. He was off to Scotland the next morning, where he intended to “join up.”!

He met Joan, radiant, a morning or two later. The English Government had resigned and preparations for a general election were already on foot. “I expect that was it,” Joan confessed. “It interferes with our reason at times.”

“They didn’t get on very well together, Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle?” Joan queried, scenting the opportunity of obtaining first-class evidence. The stars came out before they had ended dinner. She had made him talk about himself. It was marvellous what he had accomplished with his opportunities. Ten hours a day in the mines had earned for him his living, and the night had given him his leisure. An attic, lighted by a tallow candle, with a shelf of books that left him hardly enough for bread, had been his Alma Mater. History was his chief study. There was hardly an authority Joan could think of with which he was not familiar. Julius Caesar was his favourite play. He seemed to know it by heart. At twenty-three he had been elected a delegate, and had entered Parliament at twenty-eight. It had been a life of hardship, of privation, of constant strain; but she found herself unable to pity him. It was a tale of strength, of struggle, of victory, that he told her. Mrs. Phillips acquiesced. “It’s turning me into a lazy-bones,” she said with a smile. “I can sit here by the hour, just watching the bustle. I was always one for a bit of life.”