It seemed to the Dean that a shudder passed through the man beside him.

“Impossible,” said Ashe, sharply.  “But not only for private reasons.”

“You mean your public duty stands in the way?”

“Kitty left me of her own free will.  I have put my hand to the plough again—­and I cannot turn back.  You can see for yourself that I am not at my own disposal—­I belong to my party, to the men with whom I act, who have behaved to me with the utmost generosity.”

“Of course Lady Kitty could no longer share your public life.  But at Haggart—­in seclusion?”

“You know what her personality is—­how absorbing—­how impossible to forget!  No—­if she returned to me, on any terms whatever, all the old conditions would begin again.  I should inevitably have to leave politics.”

“And that—­you are not prepared to do?”

The Dean wondered at his own audacity, and a touch of proud surprise expressed itself in Ashe.

“I should have preferred to put it that I have accepted great tasks and heavy responsibilities—­and that I am not my own master.”

The Dean watched him closely.  Across the field of imagination there passed the figure of one who “went away sorrowful, having great possessions,” and his heart—­the heart of a child or a knight-errant—­burned within him.

But before he could speak again the door of the room opened and a lady in black entered.  Ashe turned towards her.

“Do you forbid me, William?” she said, quietly—­“or may I join your conversation?”

Ashe held out his hand and drew her to him.  Lady Tranmore greeted her old friend the Dean, and he looked at her overcome with emotion and doubt.

“You have come to us at a critical moment,” he said—­“and I am afraid you are against me.”

She asked what they had been discussing, though, indeed, as she said, she partly guessed.  And the Dean, beginning to be shaken in his own cause, repeated his pleadings with a sinking heart.  They sounded to him stranger and less persuasive than before.  In doing what he had done he had been influenced by an instinctive feeling that Ashe would not treat the wrong done him as other men might treat it; that, to put it at the least, he would be able to handle it with an ethical originality, to separate himself in dealing with it from the mere weight of social tradition.  Yet now as he saw the faces of mother and son together—­the mother leaning on the son’s arm—­and realized all the strength of the social ideas which they represented, even though, in Ashe’s case, there had been a certain individual flouting of them, futile and powerless in the end—­the Dean gave way.

“There—­there!” he said, as he finished his plea, and Lady Tranmore’s sad gravity remained untouched.  “I see you both think me a dreamer of dreams!”

“Nay, dear friend!” said Lady Tranmore, with the melancholy smile which lent still further beauty to the refined austerity of her face; “these things seem possible to you, because you are the soul of goodness—­”