"I can read your thoughts," Selingman said quickly. "You are feeling, are you not, that to-night his leaving us has in it something allegorical. He was made for the storms of life, to fight in them and rejoice in them, and Fate has taken him by the hand and is leading him now towards the quieter places."
"It is not his choice," Julia murmured. "It is destiny."
"Can't you look a little way into the future?" Selingman continued, peering through half-closed eyes into his wine glass. "He represents the only possible link between the only possible political party of this country and the people. He will win for them in twelve months what they might have waited for through many weary years. He will sit in the high places. History will speak well of him. I will wager you half a dozen pairs of gloves that within a week the Daily Oracle will call him the modern Rienzi. And yet, with the end of the struggle, with the end of the fierce fighting, comes something—what is it?—disappointment? We have no right to be disappointed, and yet, somehow, one feels that it is the cold and the storm and the wind which keep the best in us—the fighting best—alive."
Julia's eyes were soft, for a moment, with tears. She, too, was following him a little way into the future.
"They will make a politician of him," she sighed. "So much the better for politics. But there is one thing which I do not think that he will ever forget. So long as he lives he will be a people's man."
Selingman became curiously silent. Soon he paid the bill.
"Will you put me in a cab?" she asked him outside. He shook his head.
"I shall ride home with you."
"It is rather a long way," she reminded him. "I am down at my old rooms again. The house in Russell Square is full of workmen, after the fire." "It does not matter how far," he said simply.
His fit of silence continued. When at last they arrived at their destination, she held out her hand. Again he shook his head.