"I'll see Parliament damned first!" cried Paul, his nerves on edge.
"You'll have to wait a long time, sonny," said Barney Bill, wagging a sage head. "Parliament takes a lot of damning."
"Anyhow," said Paul, not eager to continue the argument, but unconsciously caught in the drift of Barney Bill's philosophy, "my private life isn't politics, and there's not going to be another lie in my private life as long as I live."
The old man broke a short silence with a dry chuckle. "How it takes one back!" he said reflectively. "Lor lumme! I can hear yer speaking now—just in the same tone—the night what yer run away with me. Yer hadn't a seat to yer breeches then, and now you've a seat in Parliament." He chuckled again at his joke. "But"—he gripped the young man's knee in his bony clasp—"you're just the same Paul, sonny, God bless yer—and you'll come out straight all right. Here we are."
The car drew up before Silas Finn's house. They entered. Jane, summoned, came down at once and met them in the dreadful dining-room, where a simple meal was spread.
"I haven't heard—" she said.
"I'm in."
"I'm glad."
"My father—?" he asked curtly.
She looked at him wide-eyed for a second or two as he stood, his fur-lined coat with astrachan collar thrown open, his hand holding a soft felt hat on his hip, his absurdly beautiful head thrown back, to casual glance the Fortunate Youth of a month or two ago. But to Jane's jealous eye he was not even the man she had seen that afternoon. He looked many years older. She confessed afterwards to surprise at not finding his hair grey at the temples, thus manifesting her ordered sense of the harmonious. She confessed, too, that she was frightened—Jane who, for any other reason than the mere saving of her own skin, would have stolidly faced Hyrcanean tigers—at the stern eyes beneath the contracted brows. He was a different Paul altogether. And here we have the divergence between the masculine and the feminine point of view. Jane saw a new avatar; Barney Bill the ragged urchin of the Bludston brick-fields. She shifted her glance to the old man. He, standing crookedly, cocked his head and nodded.