She tried to get rid of the subject.
"So you lost your seat," she said. "I am very sorry. Tell me how it happened?"
He shrugged his shoulders.
"The Democratic Party made up their mind, for some reason or other, that I shouldn't sit. The Labour Party generally were not thinking of running a candidate. I was to have been returned unopposed, in acknowledgment of my work on the Nationalisation Bill. The Democrats, however, ratted. They put up a man at the last moment, and—well, you know the result—I lost."
"I don't understand English politics," she confessed, "but I thought you were almost a Labour man yourself."
"I am practically," he replied. "I don't know, even now, what made them oppose me."
"What about the future?"
"My plans are not wholly made."
For the first time, an old and passionate ambition prevailed against the thrall of the moment.
"One of the papers this morning," she said eagerly, "suggested that you might be offered a peerage."