Winston.
"Well, old fellow!" said Ashe, clapping a hand on Darrell's shoulder.
"Uncommonly glad to see you. You look as though that damned London had
been squeezing the life out of you. Come for a stroll before dinner?"
The two men accordingly left the talkers on the lawn, and struck into
the park. Ashe, in a straw hat and light suit, made his usual impression
of strength and good-humor. He was gay, friendly, amusing as ever. But
Darrell was not long in discovering or imagining signs of change. Any
one else would have thought Ashe's talk frankness--nay,
indiscretion--itself. Darrell at once divined or imagined in it shades
of official reserve, tracts of reticence, such as an old friend had a
right to resent.
"One can see what a personage he feels himself!"
Yet Darrell would have been the first to own that Ashe had some right to
feel himself a personage. The sudden revelation of his full intellectual
power, and of his influence in the country, for which the general
election of the preceding winter had provided the opportunity, was still
an exciting memory among journalists and politicians. He had gone into
the election a man slightly discredited, on whose future nobody took
much trouble to speculate.
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