WALLACE MACLAINE had seen Karyl Pendragon for the first time five years previously, a few months before she dawned on astonished London. He had then lived all his life in the large northern manufacturing town where his father’s great chocolate factory formed a colony, and was contemplating the move he eventually accomplished, of representing in Parliament the constituency in which his family had voted for two generations. He was then a strange and little-understood young man of twenty-five, with a vaulting ambition concealed under a reserved and even humble manner; popular with the work-people, to whom he was always genial, but having few friends in his own class.