I admitted that I had perhaps expressed myself ill. What I referred to was what I had referred to the night we met in Upper Baker Street—the importance relative (relative to virtue) of other gifts. She asked me if I called virtue a gift—as if it were handed to us in a parcel on our birthday; and I declared that this very question showed me the problem had already caught her by the skirt. She would have help however, help that I myself had once had, in resisting its tendency to make one cross.
"What help do you mean?"
"That of the member for Clockborough."
She stared, smiled, then exclaimed: "Why, my idea has been to help him!"
She had helped him—I had his own word for it that at Clockborough her bedevilment of the voters had really put him in. She would do so doubtless again and again, but I heard the very next month that this fine faculty had undergone a temporary eclipse. News of the catastrophe first came to me from Mrs. Saltram, and it was afterwards confirmed at Wimbledon: poor Miss Anvoy was in trouble—great disasters, in America, had suddenly summoned her home. Her father, in New York, had had reverses—lost so much money that no one knew what mightn't yet come of it. It was Adelaide who told me that she had gone off, alone, at less than a week's notice.
"Alone? Gravener has permitted that?"
"What will you have? The House of Commons?"
I'm afraid I damned the House of Commons: I was so much interested. Of course he would follow her as soon as he was free to make her his wife; only she mightn't now be able to bring him anything like the marriage-portion of which he had begun by having the pleasant confidence. Mrs. Mulville let me know what was already said: she was charming, this Miss Anvoy,
