He bent forward, with that sudden change of manner, that courteous sweetness of tone and gesture, which few women could resist.  Mary’s heart, seasoned though it were, felt a charming flutter.  She talked, and she talked well.  She had no independence of mind, and very little real knowledge; but she had an excellent reporter’s ability; she knew what to remember, and how to tell it.  Cliffe listened to her attentively, acknowledging to himself the while that she had certainly gained.  She was a far more definite personality than she had been when he last knew her; and her self-possession, her trained manner, rested him.  Thank Heaven, she was not a clever woman—­how he detested the breed!  But she was a useful one.  And the smiling commonplace into which she fell so often was positively welcome to him.  He had known what it was to court a woman who was more than his equal both in mind and passion; and it had left him bitter and broken.

“Well, all this is most illuminating,” he said at last.  “I owe you immense thanks.”  And he put out a pair of hands, thin, brown, and weather-stained as his face, and pressed one of hers.  “We’re very old friends, aren’t we?”

“Are we?” said Mary, drawing back.

“So far as any one can be the friend of a chap like me,” he said, hastily.  “Tell me, are you with Lady Tranmore?”

“No.  I go to her in a few days—­till I leave London.”

“Don’t go away,” he said, suddenly and insistently.  “Don’t go away.”

Mary could not help a slight wavering in the eyes that perforce met his.  Then he said, abruptly, as she rose: 

“By-the-way, they tell me Ashe is a great man.”

She caught the note of incredulous contempt in his voice and laughed.

“They say he’ll be in the cabinet directly.”

“And Lady Kitty, I understand, is a scandal to gods and men, and the most fashionable person in town?”

“Oh, not now,” said Mary.  “That was last year.”

“You mean people are tired of her?”

“Well, after a time, you know, a naughty child—­”

“Becomes a bore.  Is she a bore?  I doubt; I very much doubt.”

“Go and see,” said Mary.  “When do you lunch there?”

“I think to-morrow.  Shall I find you?”

“Oh no.  I am not at all intimate with Lady Kitty.”

Cliffe’s slight smile, as he followed her into the large drawing-room, died under his mustache.  He divined at once the relation between the two, or thought he did.

As for Mary, she caught her last sight of Cliffe, standing bareheaded on the steps of the embassy, his lean distinction, his ugly good looks marking him out from the men around him.  Then, as they drove away she was glad that the darkness hid her from Lady Tranmore.  For suddenly she could not smile.  She was filled with the perception that if Geoffrey Cliffe did not now ask her to marry him, life would utterly lose its savor, its carefully cherished and augmented savor, and youth would abandon her.  At the same time she realized that she would have to make a fight of it, with every weapon she could muster.