"When did I not give you that?" he said.
"You have always given it me," she answered. "Give it me every hour, Jim, until I cease entirely to deserve it."
Thereat he bent and kissed her hand.
[CHAPTER XII]
In the course of the next week or so Lady Brereton began to almost believe the slander that she had herself sown over the very congenial soil of London drawing-rooms; but though the town was soon as thick with it as is a cornfield in May with the green springing spears, she was afraid that her amiable object of revenging herself on Marie for the ill turn she had done her in the matter of Maud's marriage had not been blessed with the success which that masterly design deserved. Indeed, had she not known from Jack that he had told his wife what he had overheard at the "Deuce of Spades," Mildred could not have believed that Marie knew anything at all about it, so utterly unaltered was her demeanour to the world at large, and in particular to Jim Spencer. They were constantly together, but, somehow, Marie's attitude to him and his to her seemed in the eyes of people in general to contradict every moment the possibility of there being any dessous des cartes at all; in fact, Mildred's springing blades had rather the appearance of having been sown on stony ground: they seemed to her eye to look curiously without stamina. Yet, as already stated, although in less than the traditional nine days the world in general had ceased to concern itself with so misbegotten a scandal, Lady Brereton almost began to believe it herself. Her own invention, in fact, appeared probable to her; but its effect on Marie, from which she had hoped so much, was entirely unfruitful.
Lady Ardingly about this time, like an old war-horse now turned out to grass, had begun to prick up her ears at the trumpets which resounded through the land on the approach of the General Election. She, like many other people, had a great belief in Jack's powers of awakening the Government from the self-congratulatory torpor which had fallen on them.
"They sit in a somnolent circle," she said to him one day, "and awake at intervals to shake hands with each other; then they go to sleep again. Ardingly, perhaps, is the most sensible. He sleeps as soundly as anybody, but he doesn't congratulate his noble colleagues."
Jack laughed.