The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes

as a defeat. On the other hand, a defeat at a bye-election equals a victory at a general. You play a solo-and on your own trumpet.' A burst of cheering rounded off these remarks. This time Amber did not even inquire what it indicated-she was almost content to take it as an endorsement of Walter Bassett's epigrams. But Lord Woodham eagerly improved the situation. 'A fine stroke that,' he said, 'but a batsman outside a team doesn't play the game.'

'It will be a good time for the country, Lord Woodham,' Mr. Bassett returned quietly, 'when people cease to regard the Parliamentary session as a cricket match, one side trying to bowl over or catch out the other. But then England always has been a sporting nation.'

'Ah, you allow some good in the old country,' said Lady Chelmer, pleased. 'Look at the trouble we all take to come here to encourage the dear boys;' and the words ended with a tired sigh.

'Yes, of course, that is the side on which they need encouragement,' he rejoined drily. 'Majuba was lost on the playing-field of Lord's.'

There was a moment of shocked surprise. Lady Chelmer, herself a martyr to the religion of sport thus blasphemed-of which she understood as little as of any other religion-hastily tried to pour tea on the troubled waters. But they had been troubled too deeply. For full eight minutes the top of the drag became a political platform for Marquis-Ministerial denunciations of Mr. Gladstone, to a hail of repartee from the profane young man.

At the end of those eight minutes-when Lady Chelmer was at last able to reinsinuate tea into the discussion- Miss Amber Roan realised with a sudden shock that she had not 'chipped in' once, and that 'poor Walter Bassett' had commanded her ear for all that time without pouring into it a single compliment, or, indeed, addressing to it any observation whatever. For the first time since her debut in the Milwaukee parlour at the age of five, this spoiled daughter of the dollar had lost sight of herself. As they walked towards the tea-tent, through the throng of clergymen and parasols and tanned men with field-glasses, and young bloods and pretty girls, she noted uneasily that his eyes wandered from her to these types of English beauty, these flower-faces under witching hats. Indeed, he had led her out of the way to plough past a row of open carriages. 'The shortest cut,' he said, 'is past the prettiest woman.'

But he had to face her at the tea-table, where she blocked his view of the tables beyond and plied him with strawberries and smiles under the sullen glances of the Hon. Tolshunt Darcy and the timid cough of her chaperon.

'I wonder you waste your time on the silly elections,' she said. 'We don't take much stock in Senators in America.'

'It's just because M.P.'s are at such a discount that I want to get in. In the realm of the blind the one-eyed is a king.'

'They must be blind not to let you in,' she answered with equal frankness.

'No, they see too well, if you mean the voters. They've got their eye on the price of their vote.'

'What!' she cried. 'You can't buy votes in England!'

'Oh, can't you-'

'But I'm sure I read about it in the English histories-it was all abolished.'

'A good many things were abolished by the Decalogue even earlier,' he replied grimly. 'Half an hour before the poll closed I could have bought a thousand votes at a shilling each.'

'Well, that seems reasonable enough,' said Lady Chelmer.

'It was beyond my pocket.'

'What! Fifty pounds?' cried Amber, incredulously.

The blush that followed was hers, not his. 'But what became of the thousand votes?' she asked hurriedly.

He laughed. 'Half an hour before the poll closed they had gone down to sixpence apiece-like fish that wouldn't keep.'

'My! And were they all wasted?'

'No. My rival bought them up. Vide the newspapers-'the polling was unusually heavy towards the close.''

'Really!' intervened Lady Chelmer. 'Then at that rate you can unseat him for bribery.'

'At that rate-or higher,' he replied drily. 'To unseat another is even more expensive than to seat oneself.'

'Why, it seems all a question of money,' said Miss Amber Roan, naively.

II. CHASSE

Lady Chelmer was glad when the season came to an end and the dancing mice had no longer to spin dizzyingly in their gilded cage. 'The Prisoner of Pleasure' was Walter Bassett's phrase for her. Even now she was a convict on circuit. Some of the dungeons were in ancient castles, from which Bassett was barred, but all of which opened to Amber's golden keys, though only because Lady Chelmer knew how to turn them. He, however, penetrated the ducal doors through the letter-box.

The Hon. Tolshunt and Lord Woodham, in their apprehension of the common foe, began to find each other endurable. If it was politics that attracted her, Tolshunt felt he too could stoop to a career. As for the Marquis, he began to meditate resuming office. Both had freely hinted to her Ladyship that to give a millionaire bride to a man who hadn't a penny savoured of Socialism.

Galled by such terrible insinuations, Lady Chelmer had dared to sound the girl.

'I love his letters,' gushed Amber, bafflingly. 'He writes such cute things.'

'He doesn't dress very well,' said Lady Chelmer, feebly fighting.

'Oh, of course, he doesn't bother as much as Tolly, who looks as if he had been poured into his clothes-'

'Yes, the mould of fashion,' quoted Lady Chelmer, vaguely.

An eruption of Walter Bassett in the Press did not tend to allay her Ladyship's alarm, especially as Amber began to dally with the morning paper and the evening.

Opening a new People's Library at Highmead-in the absence abroad of the successful candidate-he had contrived to set the newspapers sneering. He had told the People that although they might temporarily accept such gifts as 'Capital's conscience-money,' yet it was as much the duty of the parish to supply light as to supply street- lamps; which was considered both ungracious and unsound. The donor he described as 'a millionaire of means,' which was considered wilfully paradoxical by those who did not know how great capitals are locked up in industries. But what worked up the Press most was his denunciation of modern journalism, in malodorous comparison with the literature this Library would bring the People. 'The journalist,' he said tersely, 'is Satan's secretary.' No shorter cut to notoriety could have been devised, for it was the 'Silly Season,' and Satan found plenty of mischief for his idle hands to do.

'Oh, you poor man!' Amber wrote Walter. 'Why don't you say you were thinking of America-yellow journalism, and all that? The yellow is, of course, Satan's sulphur. You would hardly believe what his secretaries have written even of poor little me! And you should see the pictures of 'The Milwaukee Millionairess' in the Sunday numbers!'

Walter Bassett did not reply regularly and punctually to Amber's letters, and it was a novel sensation to the jaded beauty who had often thrown aside masculine missives after a glance at the envelope, to find herself eagerly shuffling her morning correspondence in the hope of turning up a trump-card. A card, indeed, it often proved, though never a postcard, and Amber meekly repaid it fourfold. She found it delicious to pour herself out to him; it had the pleasure of abandonment without its humiliation. Verbally, this was the least flirtatious correspondence she had ever maintained with the opposite sex.

So when at last, towards the end of the holiday season, the pair met in the flesh at a country house (Lady Chelmer still protests it was a coincidence), Walter Bassett had no apprehension of danger, and his expression of pleasure at the coincidence was unfeigned, for he felt his correspondence would be lightened. In nothing did he feel the want of pence more keenly than in his inability to keep a secretary for his public work. 'Money is time,' he used to complain; 'the millionaire is your only Methuselah.'

The house had an old-world garden, and it was here they had their first duologue. Amber had quickly discovered that Walter was interested in the apiaries that lay at the foot of its slope, and so he found her standing in poetic grace among the tall sweet-peas, with their whites and pinks and faint purples, a basket of roses in one hand and a pair of scissors in the other.

As he came to her under the quaint trellised arch, 'I always feel like a croquet ball going through the hoop,' he