And she unfurled her fan with a jerk half melancholy, half decided. Then, suddenly, a laugh flashed over her face; she raised herself eagerly on tiptoe.
"Ah! bravo!" she said. "Here they are!"
George turned with the crowd, and saw them enter, Marcella first, in a blaze of diamonds; then the quiet face and square shoulders of her husband.
Nothing, he thought, could have been better than the manner in which both bore themselves as they passed through the throng, answering the greetings of friend and foe, and followed by the keen or hostile scrutiny of hundreds. There was no bravado, no attempt to disguise the despondency that must naturally follow on a division so threatening and in many ways so wounding. Maxwell looked grey with fatigue and short nights, while her black eyes passed wistfully from friend to friend, and had never been more quick, more responsive. Their cause was in danger; nevertheless, the impression on Tressady's mind was of two people consciously in the grip of forces infinitely greater than they—forces that would hold on their path whatever befell their insignificant mortal agents.
I steadier step when I recall,
Howe'er I slip, thou canst not fall.
So cries the thinker to his mistress, Truth. And in the temper of that cry lies the secret of brave living. One looker-on, at least,—and that an opponent,—recalled the words as he watched Marcella and her husband taking their way through the London crowd, amid the doubts of their friends and the half-concealed triumph of their foes.
It seemed to him that he could have no chance of speech with her. But presently, from the other side of the room, he saw that she had recognised and was greeting him, and, do what he would, he must needs make his way to her.
She welcomed him with great friendliness, and without a word of small reproach on the score of the weeks he had let pass without coming to see her. They fell into talk about the speeches of the evening. George thought he could see that she, or Maxwell speaking through her, was dissatisfied with Dowson's conduct of the Bill in the House, and chafing under the constitutional practice that made it necessary to give him so large a share in the matter. But she said nothing ungenerous; nor was there any bitterness towards the many false friends who had deserted them that night in the division-lobby. She spoke with eager hope of a series of speeches Maxwell was about to make in the North, and then she turned upon her companion.
"You haven't spoken since the second reading—on any of the fighting points, at least. I have been wondering what you thought of many things."
George threw his head back against the wall beside her, and was silent a moment. At last he said, looking down upon her: