"It is very good indeed," she assented. "Now your turn comes. Go to the sideboard and bring me something. Remember that I am hungry and don't forget the salad. And tell me, incidentally, whether you have heard anything of a rumour going around about Andrew Tallente?"
He served her and himself and resumed his seat.
"A rumour?" he repeated. "No, I have heard nothing. What sort of a rumour?"
"A vague but rather persistent one," she replied. "They say that it is in the power of certain people—to drive him out of political life at any moment."
Dartrey's smile was sufficiently contemptuous but there was a note of anxiety in his tone which he could not altogether conceal.
"These canards are very absurd, Nora," he declared. "The politician is the natural quarry of the blackmailer, but I should think no man of my acquaintance has lived a more blameless life than Andrew Tallente."
"I will tell you in what form the story came to me," she said. "It was from a journalist on the staff of one of our great London dailies. The rumour was that they had been indirectly approached to know if they would pay a large sum for a story, perfectly printable, but which would drive Tallente out of political life."
"Do you know the name of the newspaper?" he asked eagerly.
"I was told," Nora answered, "but under the most solemn abjuration of secrecy. You ought to be able to guess it, though. Then a woman whom I met in the Lyceum Chub this afternoon asked me outright if there was any truth in certain rumours about Tallente, so people must be talking about it."
The cloud lingered on Dartrey's face. He ate and drank in his usual sparing fashion, silently and apparently wrapped in thought. From the other side of the pink-shaded lamp which stood in the middle of the table, Nora watched him with a curious, almost a sardonic sadness in her clear eyes. An hour ago she had looked at herself in the mirror and had been startled at what she saw. The lines of her black gown, the most extravagant purchase of her life, had revealed the beauty of her soft and shapely figure. Her throat and bosom had seemed so dazzlingly white, her hair so rich and glossy, her eyes full of the hope, the softness, almost the anticipatory joy of the woman who has everything to offer to the one man in her life. She had felt as she had looked: almost a girl, with music on her lips and joyous things in her heart, nursing that wonderful gift to her sex,—the hopeless optimism begotten of love. And her little house of cards had tumbled so quickly to the ground, the little denouement on which she had counted had fallen so flat. They two were there alone. The little dinner which she had planned was as near perfection as possible. The champagne bubbled in their glasses. The soft light, the solitude, the stillness,—nothing had failed her, except the man. Stephen sat within a few feet of her, with furrowed brow and mind absorbed by a possible political problem.