Somewhere in the din George stumbled across Lady Leven, who was talking merrily to young Bayle; and found her, notwithstanding, very ready to turn and chat with him.
"Of course we are all waiting for the Maxwells," she said to him. "Will they come, I wonder?"
"Why not?"
"Do people show on their way to disaster? I think I should stay at home if I were she."
"Why, they have to hearten their friends!"
"No good," said Betty, pursing her pretty lips; "and they have fought so hard."
"And may win yet," said George, an odd sparkle in his eye, as he stood looking over his tiny companion to the door. "Nobody is sure of anything, I can tell you."
"I don't believe you care," she said audaciously, shaking her golden head at him.
"Pray, why?"
"Oh! you don't seem at all desperate," she said coolly. "Perhaps you're like Frank—you think the other side make so much better points than you do. 'If Dowson makes another speech,' Frank said to me yesterday, 'I vow I shall rat!' There's a way of talking of your own chiefs. Oh! I shall have to take him out of politics."