before he went over for his election, and after his return.  When he had found himself in a corner with poor little Mary Flood Jones, he had kissed her as a matter of course; but he did not think that he could, in any circumstances, be tempted to kiss Lady Laura.  He supposed that he was in love with his darling little Mary,—­after a fashion.  Of course, it could never come to anything, because of the circumstances of his life, which were so imperious to him.  He was not in love with Lady Laura, and yet he hoped that his intimacy with her might come to much.  He had more than once asked himself how he would feel when somebody else came to be really in love with Lady Laura,—­for she was by no means a woman to lack lovers,—­when some one else should be in love with her, and be received by her as a lover; but this question he had never been able to answer.  There were many questions about himself which he usually answered by telling himself that it was his fate to walk over volcanoes.  “Of course, I shall be blown into atoms some fine day,” he would say; “but after all, that is better than being slowly boiled down into pulp.”

The House had met on a Friday, again on the Saturday morning, and the debate on the Address had been adjourned till the Monday.  On the Sunday, Phineas determined that he would see Lady Laura.  She professed to be always at home on Sunday, and from three to four in the afternoon her drawing-room would probably be half full of people.  There would, at any rate, be comers and goers, who would prevent anything like real conversation between himself and her.  But for a few minutes before that he might probably find her alone, and he was most anxious to see whether her reception of him, as a member of Parliament, would be in any degree warmer than that of his other friends.  Hitherto he had found no such warmth since he came to London, excepting that which had glowed in the bosom of Mrs. Bunce.

Lady Laura Standish was the daughter of the Earl of Brentford, and was the only remaining lady of the Earl’s family.  The Countess had been long dead; and Lady Emily, the younger daughter, who had been the great beauty of her day, was now the wife of a Russian nobleman whom she had persisted in preferring to any of her English suitors, and lived at St. Petersburg.  There was an aunt, old Lady Laura, who came up to town about the middle of May; but she was always in the country except for some six weeks in the season.  There was a certain Lord Chiltern, the Earl’s son and heir, who did indeed live at the family town house in Portman Square; but Lord Chiltern was a man of whom Lady Laura’s set did not often speak, and Phineas, frequently as he had been at the house, had never seen Lord Chiltern there.  He was a young nobleman of whom various accounts were given by various people; but I fear that the account most readily accepted in London attributed to him a great intimacy with the affairs at Newmarket, and a partiality for convivial pleasures.  Respecting Lord Chiltern