“Why should I?”
“And you a politician?”
“Oh, politics!” he said. “That’s gone.” It had, and, as he saw thankfully, at the right time. He tried to imagine how differently this would have affected him if it had come in the midst of the Sandyford election. Electors postulate respectability in a candidate. But that had gone, and gossip did not matter now. The real things mattered. Ada mattered.
“You’ve had a move on, then,” she said, and neither her look nor tone suggested that she found the move displeasing.
“I daresay,” he said carelessly. “But Ada must come back. I’ve got to get her back.”
“Happen she’ll come and happen she won’t, and I’d have a better chance of knowing which if you’d told me what’s upset her.”
“What did she say?” he asked. “Unfaithful? Yes, it’s true. I’ve been unfaithful for ten years. I’ve never been faithful and I’ve never been fair. I’ve thought of the business and politics when I ought to have been thinking of her. I worked at them and I didn’t work at Ada. Don’t blame Ada, mother. I’ll not have that. You never liked her, and you prophesied a failure. It’s been a failure, but I made it one; I let it drift when I ought to have taken hold. But it isn’t going to be a failure now. I’ve given up the other things and I’ve come back to my job, the job I neglected, the job I did not see was there at all until——” He paused.
“Till what?” she asked.
“Till Effie showed it me.”
“Effie?” she asked. “Oh! Then there’s something in their talk.”