Tallente masked his irritation and answered with a smile.

"Civil war," he declared, "commences to-morrow. Every one with a title
is to be interned in an asylum, all country houses are to be turned into
sanatoriums and all estates will be confiscated."

"The tiresome man won't tell us anything," Lady Alice sighed.

"Of course, he won't," Mrs. Ward Levitte observed. "You can't announce
a revolution beforehand truthfully."

"If there is a revolution within the next fifteen years," Tallente said,
"I think it will probably be on behalf of the disenfranchised
aristocracy, who want the vote back again."

Lady English and Mrs. Levitte found something else to talk about
between themselves. Lady Somerham, however, had no intention of letting
Tallente escape.

"You are a neighbour of my niece in Devonshire, I believe?" she asked.

He admitted the fact monosyllabically. He was supremely uncomfortable,
and it seemed to him that Jane, who was conducting an apparently
entertaining conversation with Colonel Fosbrook, might have done
something to rescue him.

"My niece has very broad ideas," Lady Somerham went on. "Some of her
fellow landowners in Devonshire are very much annoyed with the way she
has been getting rid of her property."