"All," I said, as I got up from my chair.
"Then what the hell d'you want to come here for, wasting my time?" he thundered. "You told Bannerman you'd got a proposal to make!"
"O'Rane proposes that you should retire from public life," I explained. "I always think it's better to do a thing voluntarily than under compulsion."
On that he left the doorway and came into the room.
"This is a threat, is it?" he asked, looking down on me with arms akimbo.
"A forecast," I substituted. "I see from the papers that you may be invited to join the Government. You will never join the Government, Grayle, or, if you do, you'll leave it before you have time to find out where your office is. If you retire voluntarily, you may live to an honoured old age; if you force O'Rane to go through with his petition, I'm afraid you'll have a very ugly fall."
Grayle loosened his belt, though with too much deliberate preoccupation to suggest that he was about to use it as an argument in favour of our retirement; then he unbuttoned his tunic, removed a bundle of papers from a woollen khaki waistcoat and transferred them to one of his outside breast-pockets.
"Do you know? your forecast does not strike me as exhaustive," he observed, as he settled his belt in place once more. "As a preliminary, however, does O'Rane propose to go on with the divorce?"
"Frankly, I can't tell you," I said. "He would like to consult his wife's wishes. I make no bones about telling you, Grayle, that you get very little out of any proposed arrangement. If she wants a divorce, your—fair name, shall we call it?—is smirched, whatever you do; but I fancy, unless you find your parliamentary duties too exacting for your enfeebled health—and that within one week from to-night,—your fair name will be smirched whether she wants a divorce or not. I can't say what's in her mind, of course, but, if you accept defeat at once, there's a fifty per cent. chance that you'll escape a scandal in which, when all's said and done, you don't cut a very gallant figure. By the way, I have to have your answer to-night."
"My answer's 'no.'"