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Kit Harington walked up Whitehall to the National Gallery after collecting some letters in the House of Commons. It was a bright springlike morning, with glinting sunlight in the windows of the old Banqueting Hall, which he seldom passed without thinking of Charles who stepped out of one of those windows to the scaffold.

He felt excited at the thought of seeing Pamela again and he allowed himself the hope—a rather desperate hope—that she might have changed her mind about that fellow Julian Inchbold. Otherwise why ask him to meet her? Why want to see him again after breaking his heart? No one in Whitehall would have guessed that Christopher Harington, M.P., was a gentleman with a broken heart. He walked briskly. His blue eyes looked keen and vital. He smiled and raised a finger to his hat when a friend passed him and said, “ ’Morning, Harington.”

He saw Pamela at the top of the flight of steps outside the Gallery, and he ran up to her and said, “Hullo, Pam!” speaking those two words emotionally with a kind of eagerness and expectation.

She gave him her hand and he raised it to his lips.

“It’s nice to see you, Kit,” she said, rather shyly. “Thanks for meeting me. Where can we talk?”

“Anywhere,” he answered. “Here. In the middle of Trafalgar Square. What about a spot of lunch?”

“A bit early, isn’t it?”

“People lunch early nowadays,” he told her. “The early bird avoids the queue. I know a decent little place in Soho. Let’s take a taxi there.”

“Isn’t that extravagant? Why not walk?”

“Because I want to kiss you in the taxi. Damn it all, I haven’t kissed you for over a year.”

“Only one kiss,” said Pamela demurely. “I shall be a married woman in a few weeks.”

He looked at her with a kind of humorous anguish, if there is such an emotion in human psychology.

“Then why the devil did you ask me to meet you here? What’s your idea of playing cat-and-mouse with me? Blast you, woman! I won’t be a plaything of your feline claws. You’ve broken my heart. Isn’t that enough?”

His voice rang out on the steps of the National Gallery—that resonant voice which had been overheard in the ‘Samovar’. Two girls going into the Gallery turned and tittered. A grey-haired woman with a black handbag blushed as though embarrassed by this emotional declaration by a red-headed young man with very blue eyes.

“Kit!” exclaimed Pamela, with an uneasy laugh. “Don’t make a scene in public.”

“Damn the public!” said Kit, who would not, as a politician, have uttered such words in his own constituency.

“Better have a taxi,” said Pamela, desiring more privacy.

In the taxi she held Harington’s hand and said: “You can give me one chaste kiss, Kit. For friendship’s sake.”

He put an arm round her and drew her close to him and kissed her lips until she pulled back and smiled sideways at him, and said, “Now be good, Kit.”

“I’m not going to be good,” he said, like a naughty boy quarrelling with his nurse. “I’m going to behave like a cave man. I am a cave man. That’s why I have red hair. Nobody is going to rob me of my mate.”

“I suppose I’m a cave woman,” said Pamela, “I’ve fallen in love with a very primitive young man, passionately and irresistibly. It’s queer how uncivilized we are under our skins. It makes one rather frightened.”

“Kipling had something to say about it,” answered Harington.

The taxi driver who was listening to this conversation through three inches of open window behind his ear grinned into space. He heard some funny stuff sometimes. His missus wouldn’t believe it.

Harington laughed suddenly as he turned and saw Pamela’s pretty face which he thought more than pretty.

“You’re about as much like a cave woman as the portrait of a lady by Millais or Watts. Aren’t we both talking nonsense?”

“We are,” admitted Pamela. “I wanted you to meet me so that we could talk reasonably like civilized people. I wanted to play fair and not do what I’m going to do in a hole-and-corner way. I like playing straight. I wanted to tell you all about it, my dear, because I value your friendship and count on your sweetness and loyalty, which I need.”

“You can’t get away with that,” he told her, angrily. “I’ve no sweetness left in me. I’m a soured and bitter man. As for loyalty, where’s yours, lady? You’ve let me down with a crash. We were almost engaged. You knew my love for you. You threw it into the mud like an old glove. Is that loyalty?”

“Kit,” said Pamela, touching his hand again, “I want your friendship now. It’s very precious to me. I want you to stand by me.”

“Gosh!” cried Harington. “This woman thinks she can disarm me by old stuff in the style of Jane Austen and Miss Mitford. She thinks I’m going to behave like a little gentleman—Little Lord Fauntleroy—while she gets away with murder—the murder of my soul. Oh well, here we are.”

The taxi slowed down and slithered up to the kerbstone of a restaurant in Great Compton Street.

“Nice day,” said the taxi driver while Harington felt for half a crown. He wheezed heavily from a touch of bronchitis and then winked at Harington and quoted some familiar words in a husky voice.

“ ‘In the spring a young man’s fancy...’ Ah! I wish I was forty years younger!”

Harington smiled somewhat bitterly at this yearning for youth by one of the ancients, paid his fare, held Pamela’s arm tightly and led her into the restaurant where there were only a few people at the tables.

“Table for two, m’sieu? By the window there. An apéritif, m’sieu?”

The patron bowed to Pamela, a waiter flicked an imaginary crumb off the snow-white table-cloth.

“Is this all right?” asked Harington.

“Perfect,” said Pamela. “After Berlin it’s impossible to believe that we went through the Blitz. Yesterday I was in Berlin surrounded by ruin and rubble.”

“I wish you had never gone there,” said Harington. “What are we going to eat? Hors d’œuvres? Croûte? au pot?”

Harington behaved quite reasonably until the coffee stage of the meal. Two young Frenchmen came to the table next to theirs and handicapped conversation to some extent until they were engaged with their own affairs. Harington answered Pamela’s questions about the political situation in England which he described as playing skittles on the edge of a yawning gulf.

“Your father is one of the few who dare to tell the truth. He made a great speech in the Lords the other afternoon. It was a plea for a political truce and national unity in a time of peril.”

“I heard a bit of it on the wireless,” said Pamela. She did not tell him that she listened to it while sitting on the floor between the knees of Julian Inchbold in a block of workmen’s flats.

Harington became talkative about the economic situation in England but interrupted himself once to say something quite irrelevant in a low voice.

“You’re looking wonderful, Pam. You’re more beautiful than when I last saw you.”

“Thanks, Kit, it’s sweet of you to think so.”

Later she accepted a cigarette from him and spoke more freely now that the two Frenchmen had paid up and departed.

“Kit, I’m in a bit of a jam. You know Julian’s father is a Labour member?”

“Only too well,” answered Christopher, sulkily. “Don’t talk to me about him.”

“I’ve come here to talk about him.”

“I won’t listen.”

“Listen, Kit! I’m like Juliet whose parents had a political feud with Romeo’s family. Mother is furious with me. She wrote me a letter telling me that I was disgracing my father’s name and that if I married the son of a Labour man she would never speak to me again. She denounces the Labour Government as though it were filled with devils. You know her violence of expression.”

“I do!” answered Harington with a short laugh. “She’s the last representative of those strong-minded ladies who thought Gladstone was a wicked old villain and dear Disraeli the only true patriot.”

“That was before Mother’s time,” said Pamela with a smile. “She’s not as old as all that!”

“She carries on the tradition,” said Harington. “But I agree with her hostility to your intending mésalliance with that young swine who has been making love to you, damn his impertinence.”

“You would like him,” said Pamela. “And the amusing thing is that he hates the Labour Government almost as much as Mother. He says they’re a bunch of crooks.”

“Oh,” said Harington, dryly. “That’s because he thinks that will go down well with the daughter of Lord Bramley. Although I’m on the other side I have a certain respect for some of the Labour men. They’re doing their best—after frightful mistakes—in a time of extreme crisis. I want to be fair to them.”

Pamela raised her eyebrows and laughed.

“You talk like Daddy. He makes Mother furious. I think you must be the only two people in England who are fair-minded.”

Harington laughed.

“A very charming speech, but dead wrong. The people of this stricken island hate the extremes and all the party slogans and all the insincerity of the sham fight. They would like to see a middle-of-the-road Government. If the Liberals had any big leader they could sweep the country at the next election.”

He broke off and laughed again.

“Why are you and I talking politics? I didn’t come here to make an election address. I came here to have it out with you about that young blackguard who has been making love to you.”

“Kit,” said Pamela, “I’m going to marry him. Please keep a civil tongue in your head for my future husband.”

Harington’s fair skin flushed hotly almost to the colour of his hair.

“I’m sorry,” he said in a low voice. “I suppose I’m behaving like a cad. It’s because I love you so much. It’s because I want you so much. You and I, Pam, belong to each other. Fate meant us for each other. Won’t you chuck that fellow? Won’t you come to me?”

“I can’t,” she said. “Julian has swept me off my feet. I can’t resist him.”

She spoke those words as though she were being carried away by some predetermined force against which she was powerless to struggle.

Harington gave a groan of anguish which startled some of the people in the restaurant who glanced in his direction.

“Not, I hope, a case of ptomaine poisoning,” said a young man in an audible murmur to a young woman at a nearby table.

“Bill, please,” said Harington, snapping his fingers at the waiter.

He lowered his voice and spoke again to Pamela.

“One day you will come to me and I shall be waiting. But it won’t be the same as if you came now.”

“Oh, Kit,” said Pamela, tremulously, “I wish I could!”

There was a mist of tears in her eyes.

“Why not? For God’s sake, Pam, my beloved——”

“I can’t... I can’t.... I’m in love with Julian.”

“Then it’s no use talking,” said Harington.

His fair skin went very pale. His mouth hardened. He was suffering abominably, but he was angry.

“Let’s pay and get out of this disgusting place. I’ll get another taxi. Where shall I drop you?”

“Not in the Thames!” she answered, with a nervous laugh.

She let him kiss her again before he left the taxi at the entrance to Palace Yard. She was driving on to Kensington.

“Wish me luck!” she whispered. “Be generous and forgiving, Kit, my dear.”

“You’ve broken my heart,” he told her. “I’m a tortured man.”

The policeman at the gate saluted Christopher Harington, M.P.