The hands of the clock on the front of the Strangers' Gallery were nearing six. The long-expected introductory speech of the Minister in charge of the new Land Bill was over, and the leader of the Opposition was on his feet. The House of Commons was full and excited. The side galleries were no less crowded than the benches below, and round the entrance-door stood a compact throng of members for whom no seats were available. With every sentence, almost, the speaker addressing the House struck from it assent or protest; cheers and counter-cheers ran through its ranks; while below the gangway a few passionate figures on either side, the freebooters of the two great parties, watched one another angrily, sitting on the very edge of their seats, like arrows drawn to the string.

Within that privileged section of the Ladies' Gallery to which only the Speaker's order admits, there was no less agitation than on the floor below, though the signs of it were less evident. Some half a dozen chairs placed close against the grille were filled by dusky forms invisible, save as a dim patchwork, to the House beneath them—women with their faces pressed against the lattice-work which divided them from the Chamber, endeavoring to hear and see, in spite of all the difficulties placed in their way by a graceless Commons. Behind them stood other women, bending forward sometimes over the heads of those in front, in the feverish effort to catch the words of the speech. It was so dark in the little room that no inmate of it could be sure of the identity of any other unless she was close beside her; and it was pervaded by a constant soft frou-frou of silk and satin, as persons from an inner room moved in and out, or some lady silently gave up her seat to a new-comer, or one of those in front bent over to whisper to a friend behind. The background of all seemed filled with a shadowy medley of plumed hats, from which sometimes a face emerged as a shaft of faint light from the illumined ceiling of the House struck upon it.

The atmosphere was very hot, and heavy with the scent of violets, which seemed to come from a large bunch worn by a slim standing girl. In front of the girl sat a lady who was evidently absorbed in the scene below. She rarely moved, except occasionally to put up an eyeglass the better to enable her to identify some face on the Parliamentary benches, or the author of some interruption to the speaker. Meanwhile the girl held her hands upon the back of the lady's chair, and once or twice stooped to speak to her.

Next to this pair, but in a corner of the gallery, and occupying what seemed to be a privileged and habitual seat, was a woman of uncouth figure and strange headgear. Since the Opposition leader had risen, her attention had wholly wandered. She yawned perpetually, and talked a great deal to a lady behind her. Once or twice her neighbor threw her an angry glance. But it was too dark for her to see it; though if she had seen it she would have paid no attention.

"Lady Coryston!" said a subdued voice. The lady sitting in front of the girl turned and saw an attendant beckoning.

The girl moved toward him, and returned.

"What is it, Marcia?"

"A note from Arthur, mamma."

A slip of paper was handed to Lady Coryston, who read it in the gloom with difficulty. Then she whispered to her daughter:

"He hopes to get his chance about seven; if not then, after dinner."

"I really don't think I can stay so long," said the girl, plaintively. "It's dreadfully tiring."

"Go when you like," said her mother, indifferently. "Send the car back for me."

She resumed her intent listening just as a smart sally from the speaker below sent a tumultuous wave of cheers and counter-cheers through his audience.

"He can be such a buffoon, can't he?" said the stout lady in the corner to her companion, as she yawned again. She had scarcely tried to lower her voice. Her remark was, at any rate, quite audible to her next-door neighbor, who again threw her a swift, stabbing look, of no more avail, however, than its predecessors.

"Who is that lady in the corner—do you mind telling me?"

The query was timidly whispered in the ear of Marcia Coryston by a veiled lady, who on the departure of some other persons had come to stand beside her.

"She is Mrs. Prideaux." said Miss Coryston, stiffly.

"The wife of the Prime Minister!" The voice showed emotion.

Marcia Coryston looked down upon the speaker with an air that said, "A country cousin, I suppose."

But she whispered, civilly enough: "Yes. She always sits in that corner. Weren't you here when he was speaking?"

"No—I've not long come in."

The conversation dropped, just as the voice of the orator standing on the left of the Speaker rose to his peroration.

It was a peroration of considerable eloquence, subtly graduated through a rising series of rhetorical questions, till it finally culminated and broke in the ringing sentences:

"Destroy the ordered hierarchy of English land, and you will sweep away a growth of centuries which would not be where it is if it did not in the main answer to the needs and reflect the character of Englishmen. Reform and develop it if you will; bring in modern knowledge to work upon it; change, expand, without breaking it; appeal to the sense of property, while enormously diffusing property; help the peasant without slaying the landlord; in other words, put aside rash, meddlesome revolution, and set yourselves to build on the ancient foundations of our country what may yet serve the new time! Then you will have an English, a national policy. It happens to be the Tory policy. Every principle of it is violated by the monstrous bill you have just brought in. We shall oppose it by every means and every device in our power!"

THE CONVERSATION DROPPED, JUST AS THE VOICE OF THE ORATOR ROSE TO HIS PERORATION

The speaker sat down amid an ovation from his own side. Three men on the Liberal side jumped up, hat in hand, simultaneously. Two of them subsided at once. The third began to speak.

A sigh of boredom ran through the latticed gallery above, and several persons rose and prepared to vacate their places. The lady in the corner addressed some further remarks on the subject of the speech which had just concluded to an acquaintance who came up to greet her. "Childish!—positively childish!"

Lady Coryston caught the words, and as Mrs. Prideaux rose with alacrity to go into the Speaker's private house for a belated cup of tea, her Tory neighbor beckoned to her daughter Marcia to take the vacant chair.

"Intolerable woman!" she said, drawing a long breath. "And they're in for years! Heaven knows what we shall all have to go through."

"Horrible!" said the girl, fervently. "She always behaves like that. Yet of course she knew perfectly who you were."

"Arthur will probably follow this man," murmured Lady Coryston, returning to her watch.

"Go and have some tea, mother, and come back."

"No. I might miss his getting up."

There was silence a little. The House was thinning rapidly, and half the occupants of the Ladies' Galleries had adjourned to the tearooms on the farther side of the corridor. Marcia could now see her mother's face more distinctly as Lady Coryston sat in a brown study, not listening, evidently, to the very halting gentleman who was in possession of the House, though her eyes still roamed the fast-emptying benches.

It was the face of a woman on the wrong side of fifty. The complexion was extremely fair, with gray shades in it. The eyes, pale in color but singularly imperious and direct, were sunk deep under straight brows. The nose was long, prominent, and delicately sharp in the nostril. These features, together with the long upper lip and severely cut mouth and chin, the slightly hollow cheeks and the thin containing oval of the face, set in pale and still abundant hair, made a harsh yet, on the whole, handsome impression. There was at Coryston, in the gallery, a picture of Elizabeth Tudor in her later years to which Lady Coryston had been often compared; and she, who as a rule disliked any reference to her personal appearance, did not, it was sometimes remarked, resent this particular comparison. The likeness was carried further by Lady Coryston's tall and gaunt frame; by her formidable carriage and step; and by the energy of the long-fingered hands. In dress also there was some parallel between her and the Queen of many gowns. Lady Coryston seldom wore colors, but the richest of black silks and satins and the finest of laces were pressed night and day into the service of her masterful good looks. She made her own fashions. Amid the large and befeathered hats of the day, for instance, she alone wore habitually a kind of coif made of thin black lace on her fair face, the lappets of which were fastened with a diamond close beneath her chin. For the country she invented modifications of her London dress, which, while loose and comfortable, were scarcely less stately. And whatever she wore seemed always part and parcel of her formidable self.

In Marcia's eyes, her mother was a wonderful being—oppressively wonderful—whom she could never conveniently forget. Other people's mothers were, so to speak, furniture mothers. They became the chimney-corner, or the sofa; they looked well in combination, gave no trouble, and could be used for all the common purposes of life. But Lady Coryston could never be used. On the contrary, her husband—while he lived—her three sons, and her daughter, had always appeared to her in the light of so many instruments of her own ends. Those ends were not the ends of other women. But did it very much matter? Marcia would sometimes ask herself. They seemed to cause just as much friction and strife and bad blood as other people's ends.

As the girl sat silent, looking down on the bald heads of a couple of Ministers on the Front Bench, she was uneasily conscious of her mother as of some charged force ready to strike. And, indeed, given the circumstances of the family, on that particular afternoon, nothing could be more certain than blows of some kind before long....

"You see Mr. Lester?" said her mother, abruptly. "I thought Arthur would get him in."

Marcia's dreaminess departed. Her eyes ran keenly along the benches of the Strangers' Gallery opposite till they discovered the dark head of a man who was leaning forward on his elbows, closely attentive, apparently, to the debate.

"Has he just come in?"

"A minute or two ago. It means, I suppose, that Arthur told him he expected to be up about seven. When will this idiot have done!" said Lady Coryston, impatiently.

But the elderly gentleman from the Highlands, to whom she thus unkindly referred, went on humming and hawing as before, while the House lumbered or fidgeted, hats well over noses and legs stretched to infinity.

"Oh, there is Arthur!" cried Marcia, having just discovered her brother among the shadows under the gallery to the left. "I couldn't make him out before. One can see he's on wires."

For while everybody else, after the excitement of the two opening speeches, which was now running its course through the crowded lobbies outside, had sunk into somnolence within the House itself, the fair-haired youth on whom her eyes were bent was sitting erect on the edge of his seat, papers in hand, his face turned eagerly toward the speaker on the other side of the House. His attitude gave the impression of one just about to spring to his feet.

But Marcia was of opinion that he would still have to wait some time before springing. She knew the humming and hawing gentleman—had heard him often before. He was one of those plagues of debate who rise with ease and cease with difficulty. She would certainly have time to get a cup of tea and come back. So with a word to her mother she groped her way through the dark gallery across the corridor toward a tearoom. But at the door of the gallery she turned back. There through the lattice which shuts in the Ladies' Gallery, right across the House, she saw the Strangers' Gallery at the other end. The man whose head had been propped on his hands when she first discovered his presence was now sitting upright, and seemed to be looking straight at herself, though she knew well that no one in the Ladies' Gallery was really visible from any other part of the House. His face was a mere black-and-white patch in the distance. But she imagined the clear, critical eyes, their sudden frown or smile.

"I wonder what he'll think of Arthur's speech—and whether he's seen Coryston. I wonder whether he knows there's going to be an awful row to-night. Coryston's mad!"

Coryston was her eldest brother, and she was very fond of him. But the way he had been behaving!—the way he had been defying mamma!—it was really ridiculous. What could he expect?

She seemed to be talking to the distant face, defending her mother and herself with a kind of unwilling deference.

"After all, do I really care what he thinks?"

She turned and went her way to the tearoom. As she entered it she saw some acquaintances at the farther end, who waved their hands to her, beckoning her to join them. She hastened across the room, much observed by the way, and conscious of the eyes upon her. It was a relief to find herself among a group of chattering people.

Meanwhile at the other end of the room three ladies were finishing their tea. Two of them were the wives of Liberal Ministers—by name, Mrs. Verity and Mrs. Frant. The third was already a well-known figure in London society and in the precincts of the House of Commons—the Ladies' Gallery, the Terrace, the dining-rooms—though she was but an unmarried girl of two-and-twenty. Quite apart, however, from her own qualities and claims, Enid Glenwilliam was conspicuous as the only daughter of the most vigorously hated and ardently followed man of the moment—the North Country miner's agent, who was now England's Finance Minister.

"You saw who that young lady was?" said Mrs. Frant to Miss Glenwilliam. "I thought you knew her."

"Marcia Coryston? I have just been introduced to her. But she isn't allowed to know me!" The laugh that accompanied the words had a pleasant childish chuckle in it.

Mrs. Frant laughed also.

"Girls, I suppose, have to do what they're told," she said, dryly. "But it was Arthur Coryston, wasn't it, who sent you that extra order for to-day, Enid?"

"Yes," laughed the girl again; "but I am quite certain he didn't tell his mother! We must really be civil and go back to hear him speak. His mother will think it magnificent, anyway. She probably wrote it for him. He's quite a nice boy—but—"

She shook her head over him, softly smiling to herself. The face which smiled had no very clear title to beauty, but it was arresting and expressive, and it had beautiful points. Like the girl's figure and dress, it suggested a self-conscious, fastidious personality: egotism, with charm for its weapon.

"I wonder what Lady Coryston thinks of her eldest son's performances in the papers this morning!" said lively little Mrs. Frant, throwing up hands and eyes.

Mrs. Verity, a soft, faded woman, smiled responsively.

"They can't be exactly dull in that family," she said. "I'm told they all talk at once; and none of them listens to a word the others say."

"I think I'll bet that Lady Coryston will make Lord Coryston listen to a few remarks on that speech!" laughed Enid Glenwilliam. "Is there such a thing as matria potestas? I've forgotten all the Latin I learned at Cambridge, so I don't know. But if there is, that's what Lady Coryston stands for. How splendid—to stand for anything—nowadays!"

The three fell into an animated discussion of the Coryston family and their characteristics. Enid Glenwilliam canvassed them all at least as freely as her neighbors. But every now and then little Mrs. Frant threw her an odd look, as much as to say, "Am I really taken in?"

Meanwhile a very substantial old lady, scarcely less deliberate and finely finished, in spite of her size, than Lady Coryston herself, had taken a chair beside her in the gallery, which was still very empty.

"My dear," she said, panting a little and grasping Lady Coryston's wrist, with a plump hand on which the rings sparkled—"My dear! I came to bring you a word of sympathy."

Lady Coryston looked at her coldly.

"Are you speaking of Coryston?"

"Naturally. The only logical result of those proceedings last night would be, of course, the guillotine at Hyde Park Corner. Coryston wants our heads! There's nothing else to be said. I took the speeches for young men's nonsense—just midsummer madness, but I find people very angry. Your son! one of us!"

"I thought the speeches very clever," said Lady Coryston.

"I'm rejoiced you take it so philosophically, my dear Emilia!"—the tone was a little snappish—"I confess I thought you would have been much distressed."

"What's the good of being distressed? I have known Coryston's opinions for a long time. One has to act—of course," the speaker added, with deliberation.

"Act? I don't understand."

Lady Coryston did not enlighten her. Indeed, she did not hear her. She was bending forward eagerly. The fair-haired youth on the back benches, who had been so long waiting his turn, was up at last.

It was a maiden speech, and a good one, as such things go. There was enough nervousness and not too much; enough assurance and not too much. The facts and figures in it had been well arranged. A modest jest or two tripped pleasantly out; and the general remarks at the end had been well chosen from the current stock, and were not unduly prolonged. Altogether a creditable effort, much assisted by the young man's presence and manner. He had no particular good looks, indeed; his nose ascended, his chin satisfied no one; but he had been a well-known bat in the Oxford eleven of his day, and was now a Yeomanry officer; he held himself with soldierly erectness, and his slender body, cased in a becoming pale waistcoat under his tail coat, carried a well-shaped head covered with thick and tumbling hair.

The House filled up a little to hear him. His father had been a member of Parliament for twenty years, and a popular member. There was some curiosity to know what his son would make of his first speech. And springing from the good feeling which always animates the House of Commons on such occasions, there was a fair amount of friendly applause from both sides when he sat down.

"Features the father, and takes after the mother!" said a white-haired listener in the Strangers' Gallery to himself, as the young man ceased speaking. "She's drilled him! Well, now I suppose I must go and congratulate her." He rose from his seat and began to make his way out. In the passage outside the Gallery he overtook and recognized the man whose entrance into the House Lady Coryston and her daughter had noticed about an hour earlier.

"Well, what did you think of it, Lester?"

The other smiled good-humoredly.

"Capital! Everybody must make a beginning. He's taken a lot of pains."

"It's a beastly audience!" said Sir Wilfrid Bury, in reply. "Don't I know it! Well, I'm off to congratulate. How does the catalogue get on?"

"Oh, very well. I sha'n't finish till the summer. There's a good deal still to do at Coryston. Some of the things are really too precious to move about."

"How do you get on with her ladyship?" asked the old man, gaily, lowering his voice.

The young man smiled discreetly.

"Oh, very well. I don't see very much of her."

"I suppose she's pressed you into the service—makes you help Arthur?"

"I looked out a few things for his speech to-day. But he has his own secretary."

"You're not staying for the rest of the debate?"

"No, I'm going back to St. James's Square. I have a heap of arrears to get through."

"Do they put you up there? I know it's a huge house."

"Yes. I have a bedroom and sitting-room there when I want them, and my own arrangements."

"Ta-ta."

Sir Wilfrid nodded pleasantly, and vanished into a side passage leading to the Ladies' Gallery. The young man, Reginald Lester, to whom he had been chatting, was in some sort a protÉgÉ of his own. It was Sir Wilfrid, indeed, who had introduced him, immediately after he had won an Oxford historical fellowship, to Lady Coryston, as librarian, for the highly paid work of cataloguing a superb collection of MSS. belonging to the Corystons. A generation earlier, Lester's father had been a brother officer of Sir Wilfrid's, in days when the Lester family was still rich, and before the crashing failure of the great banking-house of the name.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the House of Commons, Lady Coryston had been sitting pleasantly absorbed, watching her son, who lay now like a man relieved, lolling on the half-empty bench, chatting to a friend beside him. His voice was still in her ears: mingled with the memory of other voices from old, buried times. For more than twenty years how familiar had she been with this political scene!—these galleries and benches, crowded or listless; these opposing Cabinets—the Ins and Outs—on either side of the historic table; the glitter of the Mace at its farther end; the books, the old morocco boxes, the tops of the official wigs, the ugly light which bathed it all; the exhausted air, the dreariness, the boredom! all worth while, these last, just for the moments, the crises, the play of personalities, the conflict of giants, of which they were the inevitable conditions. There, on the second bench above the gangway on the Tory side, her husband, before he succeeded to the title, had sat through four Parliaments. And from the same point of vantage above she had watched him year after year, coming in and out, speaking occasionally, never eloquent or brilliant, but always respected; a good, worthy, steady-going fellow with whom no one had any fault to find, least of all his wife, to whom he had very easily given up the management of their common life, while he represented her political opinions in Parliament much more than his own.

Until—until?

Well, until in an evil hour, a great question, the only political question on which he differed and had always differed from his wife, on which he felt he must speak for himself and stand on his own feet, arose to divide them. There, in that Gallery, she had sat, with rage and defeat in her heart, watching him pass along, behind the Speaker's chair, toward the wrong division lobby, his head doggedly held down, as though he knew and felt her eyes upon him, but must do his duty all the same. On this one matter he had voted against her, spoken against her, openly flouted and disavowed her. And it had broken down their whole relation, poisoned their whole life. "Women are natural tyrants," he had said to her once, bitterly—"no man could torment me as you do." And then had come his death—his swift last illness, with those tired eyes still alive in the dumb face, after speech and movement were no longer possible—eyes which were apt to close when she came near.

And yet, after all—the will!—the will which all his relations and friends had taken as the final expression of his life's weakness, his miserable failure to play the man in his own household, and in which she, his wife, had recognized with a secret triumph his last effort to propitiate her, his last surrender to her. Everything left to her, both land and personalty, everything! save for a thousand a year to each of the children, and fifteen hundred a year to Coryston, his heir. The great Irish, the great Devonshire properties, the accumulated savings of a lifetime, they were all hers—hers absolutely. Her husband had stood last in the entail; and with a view to her own power, she had never allowed him to renew it.

Coryston had been furiously angry when the terms of his father's will were revealed. She could never think without shivering of certain scenes, with Coryston in the past—of a certain other scene that was still to come. Well, it had been a duel between them; and after apparently sore defeat, she had won, so far as influence over his father was concerned. And since his father's death she had given him every chance. He had only to hold his tongue, to keep his monstrous, sans-culotte opinions to himself, at least, if he could not give them up; and she would have restored him his inheritance, would have dealt with him not only justly, but generously. He had chosen; he had deliberately chosen. Well, now then it was for her—as she had said to old Lady Frensham—it was for her to reply, but not in words only.

She fell back upon the thought of Arthur, Arthur, her darling; so manly, and yet so docile; so willing to be guided! Where was he, that she might praise him for his speech? She turned, searching the dark doorway with her eyes. But there was no Arthur, only the white head and smiling countenance of her old friend, Sir Wilfrid Bury, who was beckoning to her. She hurriedly bade Marcia, who had just returned to the Gallery, to keep her seat for her, and went out into the corridor to speak to him.

"Well, not bad, was it? These youngsters have got the trick! I thought it capital. But I dare say you'll have all sorts of fault to find, you most exacting of women!"

"No, no; it was good," she said, eagerly. "And he's improving fast."

"Well then"—the wise old eyes beside her laughed kindly into hers—"be content, and don't take Coryston's escapades too hardly!"

She drew back, and her long face and haughty mouth stiffened in the way he knew.

"Are you coming to see me on Sunday?" she said, quietly.

He took his snubbing without resentment.

"I suppose so. I don't often miss, do I? Well, I hear Marcia was the beauty at the Shrewsbury House ball, and that—" he whispered something, laughing in her ear.

Lady Coryston looked a little impatient.

"Oh, I dare say. And if it's not he, it will be some one else. She'll marry directly. I always expected it. Well, now I must go. Have you seen Arthur?"

"Mother! Hullo, Sir Wilfrid!"

There was the young orator, flushed and radiant. But his mother could say very little to him, for the magnificent person in charge of the Gallery and its approaches intervened. "No talking allowed here, sir, please." Even Lady Coryston must obey. All she could add to her hurried congratulations was:

"You're coming in to-night, remember, Arthur?—nine-thirty."

"Yes, I've paired. I'm coming. But what on earth's up, mother?"

Her lips shut closely.

"Remember, nine-thirty!" She turned and went back into the darkness of the Gallery.

Arthur hesitated a moment in the passage outside. Then he turned back toward the little entrance-room opposite the entrance to the ordinary Ladies' Gallery, where he found another attendant.

"Is Miss Glenwilliam here?" he inquired, carelessly.

"Yes, sir, in the front row, with Mrs. Verity and Mrs. Frant. Do you wish to speak to her, sir? The Gallery's pretty empty."

Arthur Coryston went in. The benches sloped upward, and on the lowest one, nearest the grille, he saw the lady of his quest, and was presently bending over her.

"Well," he said, flushing, "I suppose you thought it all bosh!"

"Not at all! That's what you have to say. What else can you say? You did it excellently."

Her lightly mocking eyes looked into his. His flush deepened.

"Are you going to be at the Frenshams' dance?" he asked her, presently.

"We're not invited. They're too savage with father. But we shall be at the Opera to-morrow night."

His face lightened. But no more talk was possible. A Minister was up, and people were crowding back into the Gallery. He hurriedly pressed her hand and departed.