"I shall, of course, buy up all I can; I shall employ some lawyer fellow, and appeal to the good feelings of the newspapers. There will be no trouble with the respectable ones. But some copies will get out, and some of the Opposition newspapers will make capital out of them. Naturally!—they'd be precious fools if they didn't."
A momentary hope sprang up in Kitty.
"But if you buy it up—and stop all the papers that matter," she faltered—"why should you resign, William? There won't be—such great harm done."
For answer he opened the book, and without speaking pointed to two passages—the first, an account full of point and malice of the negotiations between himself and Lord Parham at the time when he entered the cabinet, the conditions he himself had made, and the confidential comments of the Premier on the men and affairs of the moment.
"Do you remember the night when I told you those things, Kitty?"
Yes, Kitty remembered well. It was a night of intimate talk between man and wife, a night when she had shown him her sweetest, tenderest mood, and he—incorrigible optimist!—had persuaded himself that she was growing as wise as she was lovely.
Her lip trembled. Then he pointed to the second—to the pitiless picture of Lord Parham at Haggart.
"You wrote that—when he was under our roof—there by our pressing invitation! You couldn't have written it—unless he had so put himself in your power. A wandering Arab, Kitty, will do no harm to the man who has eaten and drunk in his tent!"
She looked up, and as she read his face she understood at last how what she had done had outraged in him all the natural and all the inherited instincts of a generous and fastidious nature. The "great gentleman," so strong in him as in all the best of English statesmen, whether they spring from the classes or the masses, was up in arms.
She sprang to her feet with a cry. "William, you can't give up politics! It would make you miserable."