The old man shrugged his shoulders contemptuously.

“Lady Kitty is always so kind,” said the amicable Lady Edith.  “But her pretty dress—­I was sorry!”

“Oh no—­only an excuse for a new one,” said Mrs. Alcot.

The Dean and Lady Tranmore approached—­behind them again Ashe and Mrs. Winston.

“Well, old fellow!” said Ashe, clapping a hand on Darrell’s shoulder.  “Uncommonly glad to see you.  You look as though that damned London had been squeezing the life out of you.  Come for a stroll before dinner?”

The two men accordingly left the talkers on the lawn, and struck into the park.  Ashe, in a straw hat and light suit, made his usual impression of strength and good-humor.  He was gay, friendly, amusing as ever.  But Darrell was not long in discovering or imagining signs of change.  Any one else would have thought Ashe’s talk frankness—­nay, indiscretion—­itself.  Darrell at once divined or imagined in it shades of official reserve, tracts of reticence, such as an old friend had a right to resent.

“One can see what a personage he feels himself!”

Yet Darrell would have been the first to own that Ashe had some right to feel himself a personage.  The sudden revelation of his full intellectual power, and of his influence in the country, for which the general election of the preceding winter had provided the opportunity, was still an exciting memory among journalists and politicians.  He had gone into the election a man slightly discredited, on whose future nobody took much trouble to speculate.  He had emerged from it—­after a series of speeches laying down the principles and vindicating the action of his party—­one of the most important men in England, with whom Lord Parham himself must henceforth treat on quasi-equal terms.  Ashe was now Home Secretary, and, if Lord Parham’s gout should take an evil turn, there was no saying to what height fortune might not soon conduct him.

The will—­the iron purpose—­with which it had all been done—­that was the amazing part of it.  The complete independence, moreover.  Darrell imagined that Lord Parham must often have regretted the small intrigue by which Ashe’s promotion had been barred in the crisis of the summer.  It had roused an indolent man to action, and freed him from any particular obligation towards the leader who had ill-treated him.  Ashe’s campaign had not been in all respects convenient; but Lord Parham had had to put up with it.

The summer evening broadened as the two men sauntered on through the park, beside a small stream fringed with yellow flags.  Even the dingy Midland landscape, with its smoke-blackened woods and lifeless grass, assumed a glory of great light; the soft, interlacing clouds parted before the dying sun; the water received the golden flood, and each coot and water-hen shone jet and glossy in the blaze.  A few cries of birds, the distant shouts of harvesters, the rustling of the water-flags along the stream, these were the only sounds—­traditional sounds of English peace.