Ellen had, as her mother used to say, a great notion of politics. "Why, that you're going to stand for Parliament."

"That's true enough," he said, swelling a little.

"Could anything be finer?" she breathed. "What are you going to do?"

"I'll have to contest two-three hopeless seats. Then they'll give me something safe."

"But what will you do?"

He didn't follow.

"What'll you do after that?" She towered above him, her cheeks flushed with intellectual passion. "In Parliament, I mean. There's so much to do. Will it be housing? If it was me it would be housing. But what are you going to do?"

"I'll sit as a Liberal," he said, with an air of quiet competence. "We've always been Liberals."

"Ach! Liberal!" she said, with the spirit of one who had cried, "Keep the Liberal out!" at a Leith polling-booth and had been haled backwards by the hair from the person of Mr. Winston Churchill. Mr. Philip laughed again and felt a kind of glow. He never could get over a feeling that to discover a woman excited about an intellectual thing was like coming on her bathing; her cast-off femininity affected him as a heap of her clothes on the beach might have done. But the flash in her eyes died to the homelier fires of a more personal quarrel. "Is yon Mrs. Powell's heavy feet coming up the stair?" she enquired.

"It is so. I asked her to do a chop for me, so that I won't need to dine on the train...."

"Mercy me! We'll see the fine cook she is!" She ran out to the landing (she had never known he was so nice). Mr. Philip found that her absence acted curiously as a relief to an excitement that was beginning to buzz in his head. Then she came back with the tray, her cheeks bright and her mouth pursed, for she and the caretaker had been sandpapering each other's temperaments with a few words. "Be thankful she thought to boil a potato. No greens. And I had to ask for a bit bread. And the reason's not far to seek. She's had a drop again. It staggers me how your father, who's so particular with the rest of us, stands such a body in the place."

He did not answer her. The moment had become one of pure enjoyment. There was no sense of strain in his appreciation of her while she was putting down the tray, spreading out the plates, and doing things that were all directed to giving him comfort. Their relationship felt absolutely right.

"Will you have one of the bottles of Burgundy your father keeps for when he lunches in?" she said.

"I was just thinking I would," he answered, and went into his father's room. As he stooped before the cupboard her voice reached him, fortuitously uplifted in "The Flowers of the Forest are a' wede away." Now how did she look when she sang? It improved some people. He knelt for a minute in front of the dusty cupboard, frowning fiercely at the bottles because it struck him that she would stop singing when he went back, and he could think of no way of asking her to go on that would not be, as he put it, infra dig. And sure enough, when he entered the room a shy silence fell on her, which she broke by saying, "If you've not got the corkscrew there's one on my pocket-knife." He used it, telling himself that it spared turning on the gas again in the other room, and she stood behind him murmuring, "Yon's not a bad knife. Four blades and a thing that takes stones out of a horse's hoof...."

He sat down to his meal, and she remained by the fireplace until he said, "Pray sit down, Miss Melville, I wish I could ask you to join me...."

She obeyed because she was afraid she might be fretting him by standing there, and took the seat on the other side of the table. The gas-jet was behind her, so to him there was a gold halo about her head and her face was a dusky oval in which her eyes and the three-cornered patch of her mouth were points of ardour. She had an animal's faculty for keeping quite still. He felt a pricking appetite to force the moment on to something he could not quite previsage, and found himself saying, "Will you have some Burgundy?"

She was shocked. "Oh no!"

He perceived that here was a matter of principle. But he felt, although principles were among his conventions, not the least impulse to defer to it. Instead, the project of persuading her to do something he felt she oughtn't to do flooded him with a tingling pleasure.

He said, "But it's so pretty!" He could not imagine why he should have said that, and yet he knew when he had said it that he had hit on an argument that would weigh with her.

She sighed as who makes a concession. "Oh yes, it's pretty!" And then, to his perplexity, her face fell into complete repose. She was absorbed in the red beauty in his glass.

It angered him, yet he still felt bland and coaxing. "You'll have a glass?"

"No, thank you."

"You'll surely have a taste?"

"Ah, no—"

"Just a drop...."

Their eyes met. He was peering into her face so that he could be sure she was looking at him, and somehow the grimace seemed to be promising her infinite pleasure.

She muttered, "Well, just a drop!" and found herself laughing unhappily.

He passed her his glass.

"But what," she asked in dismay, "will you drink from?"

Almost irritably he clicked his tongue, though he still smiled. "Drink it up! Drink it up!"

She raised the glass to her lips and set her head back that the sin might have swift progress, expecting the loveliest thing, like an ice, but warm and very worldly; and informed with solemn pleasure too, for such colours are spilt on marble floors when the sun sets behind cathedral windows, such colours come into the mind when great music is played or some deep voice speaks Shakespeare....

"Ach!" she screamed, and banged the glass down on the table. "It's horrid! It draws the mouth!" She started up and stood rubbing her knuckles into her cheeks and twisting her lips. She had never thought wine was like this. It was not so much a drink as a blow in the mouth. And yet somehow she felt ashamed of not liking it. "The matron at school used to give us something for toothache that was as bad as this!" she said peevishly, and tears stood in her eyes.

Mr. Philip stood up, laughing. The crisis of his pleasure in persuading her to do the thing which she hadn't wanted to do was his joy that she hadn't liked it when she had done it. And suddenly one of the walls of the neat mental chamber in which he customarily stood fell in; by the light that streamed in upon him he perceived that his ecstasy was only just beginning. At last he knew what he wanted to do. With gusto he marked that Ellen too was conscious that the incident was not at its close, for she was still wringing her hands, though the taste of the wine must long have gone from her mouth, and was stammering miserably, "Well, if yon stuff's a temptation to any poor folk—!" Again he felt that their relationship was on a proper footing; he moved towards her, walking masterfully. Oh, it was going to be ecstasy.... There was a loud knocking at the outer door.

III

She forgot all about the wine at once, he was so very big. And he looked as though he had gold rings in his ears, although he hadn't; it was just part of his sea-going air.

He looked at her very hard and said as though it hardly mattered, "I want to see Mr. James. My name's Yaverland."

"Will you step inside?" said Ellen, with her best English accent. "Mr. Philip's expecting you." She was glad he had come, for he looked interesting, but she hoped he would not interrupt her warm comfortable occupation of mothering Mr. Philip. To keep that mood aglow in herself she stopped as they went along the passage and begged, "You'll not make him miss his train? He's away to London to-night. He should leave here on the very clap of eight."

The stranger seemed, after a moment's silence, of which, since they stood in darkness, she could not read the cause, to lay aside a customary indifference for the sake of the gravity of the occasion. "Oh, certainly; he