Gladstone made this slight and terse interruption. Mr. Morley's
face--serious, often sombre--cast in a mould and reflective of a soul
inclined to the darker rather than the more cheerful view of life's
tangled and unsatisfactory workings--grew black and troubled; the other
Ministers who were present looked--not so eloquently, but still
perceptibly--uncomfortable; Mr. Asquith--who had been a close
observer--could not keep his keen anxiety from breaking through the mask
of easy equanimity with which he is able to clothe his readiness to meet
fortune in all her moods; in short, it was for Ministerialists one of
those uncomfortable quarters of an hour in which life seems to
concentrate all its bitterness, sorrow, and anxieties within a terribly
brief space of time. And if you wanted to know further what was the full
significance of what had taken place, you saw it in the open and almost
indecent joy of Mr. Chamberlain's face; in the more subdued but a still
unctuous look of Mr. Courtney; and you could hear it in the shriller
pitch of Mr. Balfour's voice.
[Sidenote: A false alarm.]
But all the same, it was a false alarm. For if the Old Man had tripped,
he was able to recover himself very soon.
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