In this supersensitive spirit he walked down Parliament Street at half-past one in the afternoon on the eastern side of the road; and when he had come opposite to the Horse-Guards, he suddenly stopped. Behind the Horse-Guards' Arch and a little to the north rose the great red building of the Admiralty where Cynthia and he had been made acquainted with one another. But it was not of the first meeting nor of the quarrel which ended it that Harry Rames was thinking. He was not looking at the main mass of the Admiralty Building, but only at the three grayish-blue domes which surmounted it. From these domes rose three tall spars at the points of a triangle, each of them rigged and dressed with wires to which were attached curious little hoops and contrivances of cane like Catherine wheels set for a night of fireworks. He was gazing at the mechanism of wireless telegraphy.

He had passed those poles either just here or on the other side of the Horse-Guards' Parade in St. James's Park on every day when Parliament was in session; and no doubt he had often enough lifted his head and seen them with the blind eyes of a man for the landmarks he habitually walks by. But this morning his imagination was made acute by a night of wakefulness and the tension of his nerves, and he was sensitive to all the suggestion of that aerial toyshop of contrivances. He stopped. He almost fancied that he heard--so keen was the lucidity of his senses--the messages of distant ships, here tumbling on seas of storm there upright on seas of sunshine, whizzing homeward to the dim smoke-wreathed city, crowding the air. He almost fancied that he saw them, the myriad bright spokes of an illimitable wheel which hung poised roof-high over all the world. His thoughts were swept quite away from England, and the roar of Whitehall died from his ears. He saw the big roadsteads of the East and West Indies and anchored vessels mirrored in waveless seas. He saw the meetings of ships in the narrows of the great trade-routes, barkentine and schooner, tramp and liner, and in and out amongst them like the gray shadows of sharks seen beneath the water, the long cruisers of the fleet.

He walked on like a man in a dream. He left the busy harbors and the great trade-routes behind him. The stately procession of vessels receded and now he saw only one--a little, full-rigged, black-hulled ship quite alone on a silent sea, the Perhaps, reeling down with all her canvas drawing, from her sky-sail to her spanker, reeling down with the water breaking from her broad stern bows into the mists of the south. The picture was so vivid in his mind that he could see the brightness of the binnacle and the wheel spinning in the helmsman's hands. He paused again to consider why, and paused with a curious sense of comfort. Once before, on the occasion of his maiden speech, the vision of a ship had risen before his eyes. But then it was fear which had evoked the picture. He had longed to be safely upon its bridge doing the thing he knew how to do. Now he had no such fear. He was nervous, but he had no desire to run away, he had no terror that the necessary words would fail him, he had no longing to stand upon the deck of the Perhaps. He was strung up for the contest of the afternoon. He walked slowly on and turned in at the gate of Palace Yard, and still the Perhaps fled southward before his eyes.

CHAPTER XXIX

[IN THE LADIES' GALLERY]

An hour later Cynthia drove down to the House of Commons, anxious and yet expectant of triumph. For on this afternoon Harry Rames should particularly excel; the occasion was so confederate with his gifts. In debate he was as yet too inexperienced to shine with any brilliancy. His success had been made with prepared speeches. He had not as yet the art to handle words with such precision that he could express vividly in an argument across the floor just what he meant, and no more and no less. He was not at ease with his vocabulary when a sudden call was made upon it, and his lack of ease became manifest and spread, as it always does, discomfort. He was in a word on the way to becoming a polished debater but as yet he was at school. This afternoon, however, he had not to reply, not to intervene in the middle of a discussion; his business was to make the set speech which set the debate going. And here he was on his own good ground. He could prepare the vivid phrase and, a quality perhaps still more important, he could speak it. He had an invaluable gift which had stood him in good stead when he had delivered his maiden speech. He was able so to deliver a carefully concocted speech as to give the impression that he was thinking aloud. He gained his effect by an apt breaking off of sentences and a recommencement, by a sudden drop to the homeliest of colloquialisms, by a seeming deliberation in the choice of his words, so that the picturesque and living sentence, which had been so carefully thought out, appeared to leap new-minted from a furnace of conviction. He had been shrewd enough to recognize with his own unflattering estimation of his powers that an amendment to the address provided him especially with a rare opportunity.

When Cynthia reached the ladies' gallery she had some trouble to find a place whence she could command the House. The gallery was full, since it was the beginning of the session. For the same reason the House itself was not. Even though questions were being asked of the ministers, a time when the House is seldom less than crowded, there were to-day vacant spaces on the benches. The real business of Parliament would not begin until the debate on the Address was concluded. Members still lingered in the country or the south of France. Rames's amendment was considered rather as a dress-parade than an engagement. It was not expected that he would press his views to a division. At the last moment suave words from a Cabinet Minister would no doubt dissuade the recalcitrant as they had done a thousand times before.

But his supporters were there clustered close below the gangway on the three back benches; Howard Fall two seats away from Harry Rames, chirruping gently and rubbing his hands together with delight; beyond him the sandy-haired man from the Shires with an eye on Devenish upon the treasury bench, and prepared at any moment for the production of that threatened pup which the Minister for Agriculture was sure to sell them; beyond him again Colonel Challoner and the timid spirits all trying to look unconscious and most of them pretending that they only occupied these particular seats by the merest accident. But they were in full view. Robert Brook had seen to that. They were labelled plainly and legibly, and if some of them shirked at the last moment, they would still get the credit of having shared in the revolt. In front of all were the earnest men who believed the policy of Devenish to be dangerous. Behind all under the shadow of the gallery were the young bloods, all as convinced as their graver seniors in the front, but still youths spoiling for a row and totally unawed by the frockcoats of the treasury bench. Their business was to cheer and to ejaculate, not to speak. Thus had Robert Brook disposed his forces for the battle. He himself sat between Harry Rames and Howard Fall, and, looking about him, was proud of the array.

Before questions had come to an end Cynthia had squeezed herself into a place on the first row of seats behind the stone grille. She had now from her aerie the whole group within her view, or rather, the tops of all its particular heads. She waited impatiently. Every now and then a sudden fluttering like the waving of little flags ran with a crackle of sound along the benches below and showed that another page of the question paper had been turned. Questions must now be coming to an end surely, she thought in her ignorance. Her mistake was colossal. The Speaker had only this moment come to the questions of the Irish members, and there was a postmaster in Ballymena who had last week committed the hideous crime of refusing a registered letter at two minutes to eight by the church-clock. Upon this important matter, by question and supplementary question, the Imperial Parliament was forced to concentrate its attention till the hands of the clock above the door pointed to a quarter to four. Then the Speaker rose, a buzz of talk mounted to Cynthia's ears, a few members called upon by name came forward from behind the Speaker's chair to the clerk's table with private bills, others drifted out into the lobby and the tea-room and the smoking-rooms. Then once more the Speaker rose. His canopied chair was just beneath Cynthia. She could not see him but she heard his voice quite clearly.

"Captain Rames."