The newspapers had made him restless again, had dissipated the good humour of the morning, born perhaps of the mere April warmth and _bien etre_.
'Idling in a villa--with two women'-- he said to himself, bitterly--'while all these things are happening.' For the papers were full of news--of battles lost and won, on questions with which he had been at one time intimately concerned.

Once or twice in the course of these many columns he had found his own name, his own opinion quoted, but only as belonging to a man who had left the field--a man of the past--politically dead.
As he stood there with his hands upon his sides, looking out over the Alban Lake, and its broom-clad sides, a great hunger for London swept suddenly upon him, for the hot scent of its streets, for its English crowd, for the look of its shops and clubs and parks.

He had a vision of the club writing-room--of well-known men coming in and going out--discussing the news of the morning, the gossip of the House--he saw himself accosted as one of the inner circle,--he was sensible again of those short-lived pleasures of power and office.

Not that he had cared half as much for these pleasures, when he had them, as other men.

To affirm with him meant to be already half way on the road to doubt; contradiction was his character.
Nevertheless, now that he was out of it, alone and forgotten--now that the game was well beyond his reach--it had a way of appearing to him at moments intolerably attractive! Nothing before him now, in these long days at the villa, but the hours of work with Eleanor, the walks with Eleanor, the meals with his aunt and Eleanor--and now, for a stimulating change, Miss Foster! The male in him was restless.