"He won't be the only one, either," said Milburn. "Take my word for it, they'll be dead sick and sorry over this imperial craze in a year's time, every Government that's taken it up. The people won't have it. The Empire looks nice on the map, but when it comes to practical politics their bread and butter's in the home industries. There's a great principle at stake, Winter; I must say I envy you standing up for it under such favourable conditions. Liberals like Young and Windle may talk big, but when it comes to the ballot-box you'll have the whole manufacturing interest of the place behind you, and nobody the wiser. It's a great thing to carry the standard on an issue above and beyond party politics—it's a purer air, my boy."

Walter Winter's nod confirmed the sagacity of this, and appreciated the highmindedness. It was a parting nod; Mr Winter had too much on hand that morning to waste time upon Octavius Milburn; but it was full of the qualities that ensure the success of a man's relation with his fellows. Consideration was in it, and understanding, and that kind of geniality that offers itself on a plain business footing, a commercial heartiness that has no nonsense about it. He had half a dozen casual chats like this with Mr Milburn on his way up Main Street, and his manner expanded in cordiality and respect with each, as if his growing confidence in himself increased his confidence in his fellow-men. The same assurance greeted him several times over. Every friend wanted to remind him of the enemy's exigency, and to assure him that the enemy's new policy was enough by itself to bring him romping in at last; and to every assurance he presented the same acceptable attitude of desiring for particular reasons to take special note of such valuable views. At the end he had neither elicited nor imparted a single opinion of any importance; nevertheless, he was quite entitled to his glow of satisfaction.

Among Mr Winter's qualifications for political life was his capacity to arrive at an estimate of the position of the enemy. He was never persuaded to his own advantage; he never stepped ahead of the facts. It was one of the things that made him popular with the other side, his readiness to do justice to their equipment, to acknowledge their chances. There is gratification of a special sort in hearing your points of vantage confessed by the foe; the vanity is soothed by his open admission that you are worthy of his steel. It makes you a little less keen somehow, about defeating him. It may be that Mr Winter had an instinct for this, or perhaps he thought such discourse more profitable, if less pleasant, than derisive talk in the opposite sense. At all events, he gained something and lost nothing by it, even in his own camp, where swagger might be expected to breed admiration. He was thought a level-headed fellow who didn't expect miracles; his forecast in most matters was quoted, and his defeats at the polls had been to some extent neutralized by his sagacity in computing the returns in advance.

So that we may safely follow Mr Winter to the conclusion that the Liberals of South Fox were somewhat put to it to select a successor to Robert Farquharson who could be depended upon to keep the party credit exactly where he found it. The need was unexpected, and the two men who would have stepped most naturally into Farquharson's shoes were disqualified as Winter described. The retirement came at a calculating moment. South Fox still declared itself with pride an unhealthy division for Conservatives; but new considerations had thrust themselves among Liberal counsels, and nobody yet knew what the country would say to them. The place was a "Grit" strong-hold, but its steady growth as an industrial centre would give a new significance to the figures of the next returns. The Conservative was the manufacturers' party, and had been ever since the veteran Sir John Macdonald declared for a protective "National Policy," and placed the plain issue before the country which divided the industrial and the agricultural interests. A certain number of millowners—Mr Milburn mentioned Young and Windle—belonged to the Liberals, as if to illustrate the fact that you inherit your party in Canada as you inherit your "denomination," or your nose; it accompanies you, simply, to the grave. But they were exceptions, and there was no doubt that the other side had been considerably strengthened by the addition of two or three thriving and highly capitalized concerns during the past five years. Upon the top of this had come the possibility of a great and dramatic change of trade relations with Great Britain, which the Liberal Government at Ottawa had given every sign of willingness to adopt—had, indeed, initiated, and were bound by word and letter to follow up. Though the moment had not yet come, might never come, for its acceptance or rejection by the country as a whole, there could be no doubt that every by-election would be concerned with the policy involved, and that every Liberal candidate must be prepared to stand by it in so far as the leaders had conceived and pushed it. Party feeling was by no means unanimous in favour of the change; many Liberals saw commercial salvation closer in improved trade relations with the United States. On the other hand, the new policy, clothed as it was in the attractive sentiment of loyalty, and making for the solidarity of the British race, might be depended upon to capture votes which had been hitherto Conservative mainly because these professions were supposed to be an indissoluble part of Conservatism. It was a thing to split the vote sufficiently to bring an unusual amount of anxiety and calculation into Liberal counsels. The other side were in no doubt or difficulty: Walter Winter was good enough for them, and it was their cheerful conviction that Walter Winter would put a large number of people wise on the subject of preference trade bye-and-bye, who at present only knew enough to vote for it.

The great question was the practicability of the new idea and how much further it could safely be carried in a loyal Dominion which was just getting on its industrial legs. It was debated with anxiety at Ottawa, and made the subject of special instruction to South Fox, where the by-election would have all the importance of an early test. "It's a clear issue," wrote an influential person at Ottawa to the local party leaders at Elgin, "we don't want any tendency to hedge or double. It's straight business with us, the thing we want, and it will be till Wallingham either gets it through over there, or finds he can't deal with us. Meanwhile it might be as well to ascertain just how much there is in it for platform purposes in a safe spot like South Fox, and how much the fresh opposition will cost us where we can afford it. We can't lose the seat, and the returns will be worth anything in their bearing on the General Election next year. The objection to Carter is that he's only half-convinced; he couldn't talk straight if he wanted to, and that lecture tour of his in the United States ten years ago pushing reciprocity with the Americans would make awkward literature."

The rejection of Carter practically exhausted the list of men available whose standing in the town and experience of its suffrages brought them naturally into the field of selection; and at this point Cruickshank wrote to Farquharson suggesting the dramatic departure involved in the name of Lorne Murchison. Cruickshank wrote judiciously, leaving the main arguments in Lorne's favour to form themselves in Farquharson's mind, but countering the objections that would rise there by the suggestion that after a long period of confidence and steady going, in fact of the orthodox and expected, the party should profit by the swing of the pendulum toward novelty and tentative, rather than bring forward a candidate who would represent, possibly misrepresent, the same beliefs and intentions on a lower personal level. As there was no first-rate man of the same sort to succeed Farquharson, Cruickshank suggested the undesirability of a second-rate man; and he did it so adroitly that the old fellow found himself in a good deal of sympathy with the idea. He had small opinion of the lot that was left for selection, and smaller relish for the prospect of turning his honourable activity over to any one of them. Force of habit and training made him smile at Cruickshank's proposition as impracticable, but he felt its attraction, even while he dismissed it to an inside pocket. Young Murchison's name would be so unlooked-for that if he, Farquharson, could succeed in imposing it upon the party it would be almost like making a personal choice of his successor, a grateful idea in abdication. Farquharson wished regretfully that Lorne had another five years to his credit in the Liberal record of South Fox. By the time the young fellow had earned them he, the retiring member, would be quite on the shelf, if in no completer oblivion; he could not expect much of a voice in any nomination five years hence. He sighed to think of it.

It was at that point of his meditations that Mr Farquharson met Squire Ormiston on the steps of the Bank of British North America, an old-fashioned building with an appearance of dignity and probity, a look of having been founded long ago upon principles which raised it above fluctuation, exactly the place in which Mr Farquharson and Squire Ormiston might be expected to meet. The two men, though politically opposed, were excellent friends; they greeted cordially.

"So you're ordered out of politics, Farquharson?" said the squire. "We're all sorry for that, you know."

"I'm afraid so; I'm afraid so. Thanks for your letter—very friendly of you, squire. I don't like it—no use pretending I do—but it seems I've got to take a rest if I want to be known as a going concern."

"A fellow with so much influence in committee ought to have more control of his nerve centres," Ormiston told him. The squire belonged to that order of elderly gentlemen who will have their little joke. "Well, have you and Bingham and Horace Williams made up your minds who's to have the seat?"

Farquharson shook his head. "I only know what I see in the papers," he said. "The Dominion is away out with Fawkes, and the Express is about as lukewarm with Carter as he is with federated trade."

"Your Government won't be obliged to you for Carter," said Mr Ormiston; "a more slack-kneed, double-jointed scoundrel was never offered a commission in a respectable cause. He'll be the first to rat if things begin to look queer for this new policy of yours and Wallingham's."

"He hasn't got it yet," Farquharson admitted, "and he won't with my good will. So you're with us for preference trade, Ormiston?"

"It's a thing I'd like to see. It's a thing I'm sorry we're not in a position to take up practically ourselves. But you won't get it, you know. You'll be defeated by the senior partner. It's too much of a doctrine for the people of England. They're listening to Wallingham just now because they admire him, but they won't listen to you. I doubt whether it will ever come to an issue over there. This time next year Wallingham will be sucking his thumbs and thinking of something else. No, it's not a thing to worry about politically, for it won't come through."

The squire's words suggested so much relief in that conviction that Farquharson, sharp on the flair of the experienced nose for waverers, looked at him observantly.

"I'm not so sure It's a doctrine with a fine practical application for them as well as for us, if they can be got to see it, and they're bound to see it in time. It's a thing I never expected to live to believe, never thought would be practicable until lately, but now I think there's a very good chance of it. And, hang it all," he added, "it may be unreasonable, but the more I notice the Yankees making propositions to get us away from it, the more I want to see it come through."

"I have very much the same feeling," the squire acknowledged. "I've been turning the matter over a good deal since that last Conference showed which way the wind was blowing. And the fellows in your Government gave them a fine lead. But such a proposition was bound to come from your side. The whole political history of the country shows it. We're pledged to take care of the damned industries."

Farquharson smiled at the note of depression. "Well, we want a bigger market somewhere," he said with detachment "and it looks as if we could get it now Uncle Sam has had a fright. If the question comes to be fought out at the polls, I don't see how your party could do better than go in for a wide scheme of reciprocity with the Americans—in raw products, of course with a tariff to match theirs on manufactured goods. That would shut a pretty tight door on British connection though."

"They'll not get my vote if they do," said the squire, thrusting his hands fiercely into his breeches pockets.

"As you say, it's most important to put up a man who will show the constituency all the credit and benefit there is in it, anyhow," Farquharson observed. "I've had a letter this morning," he added, laughing, "from a fellow—one of the bosses, too—who wants us to nominate young Murchison."

"The lawyer?"

"That's the man. He's too young, of course—not thirty. But he's well known in the country districts; I don't know a man of his age with a more useful service record. He's got a lot of friends, and he's come a good deal to the front lately through that inter-imperial communications business—we might do worse. And upon my word, we're in such a hole—"

"Farquharson," said old Squire Ormiston, the red creeping over features that had not lost in three generations the lines of the old breed, "I've voted in the Conservative interest for forty years, and my father before me. We were Whigs when we settled in Massachusetts, and Whigs when we pulled up stakes and came North rather than take up arms against the King; but it seemed decent to support the Government that gave us a chance again under the flag, and my grandfather changed his politics. Now, confound it! the flag seems to be with the Whigs again, for fighting purposes, anyhow; and I don't seem to have any choice. I've been debating the thing for some time now, and your talk of making that fine young fellow your candidate settles it. If you can get your committee to accept young Murchison, you can count on my vote, and I don't want to brag, but I think you can count on Moneida too, though it's never sent in a Grit majority yet."

The men were standing on the steps of the bank, and the crisp air of autumn brought them both an agreeable tingle of enterprise. Farquharson's buggy was tied to the nearest maple.

"I'm going over to East Elgin to look at my brick-kilns," he said. "Get in with me, will you?"

As they drove up Main Street they encountered Walter Winter, who looked after them with a deeply considering eye.

"Old Ormiston always had the Imperial bee in his bonnet," said he.



CHAPTER XXIII

Alfred Hesketh was among the first to hear of Lorne's nomination to represent the constituency of South Fox in the Dominion Parliament. The Milburns told him; it was Dora who actually made the communication. The occasion was high tea; Miss Milburn's apprehension about Englishmen and late dinner had been dissipated in great amusement. Mr Hesketh liked nothing better than high tea, liked nothing so much. He came often to the Milburns' after Mrs Milburn said she hoped he would, and pleased her extremely by the alacrity with which he accepted her first invitation to stay to what she described as their very simple and unconventional meal. Later he won her approval entirely by saying boldly that he hoped he was going to be allowed to stay. It was only in good English society, Mrs Milburn declared, that you found such freedom and confidence; it reminded her of Mrs Emmett's saying that her sister-in-law in London was always at home to lunch. Mrs Milburn considered a vague project of informing a select number of her acquaintances that she was always at home to high tea, but on reflection dismissed it, in case an inconvenient number should come at once. She would never have gone into detail, but since a tin of sardines will only hold so many, I may say for her that it was the part of wisdom.

Mr Hesketh, however, wore the safe and attractive aspect of a single exceptional instance; there were always sardines enough for him. It will be imagined what pleasure Mrs Milburn and Miss Filkin took in his visits, how he propped up their standard of behaviour in all things unessential, which was too likely to be growing limp, so far from approved examples. I think it was a real aesthetic satisfaction; I know they would talk of it afterward for hours, with sighing comparisons of the "form" of the young men of Elgin, which they called beside Hesketh's quite outre. It was a favourite word with Mrs Milburn—outre. She used it like a lorgnette, and felt her familiarity with it a differentiating mark. Mr Milburn, never so susceptible to delicate distinctions, looked upon the young Englishman with benevolent neutrality. Dora wished it to be understood that she reserved her opinion. He might be all that he seemed, and again he might not. Englishmen were so deep. They might have nice manners, but they didn't always act up to them, so far as she had noticed. There was that Honourable Somebody, who was in jail even then for trying to borrow money under false pretences from the Governor-General. Lorne, when she expressed these views to him, reassured her, but she continued to maintain a guarded attitude upon Mr Hesketh, to everybody except Mr Hesketh himself.

It was Dora, as I have said, who imparted the news. Lorne had come over with it in the afternoon, still a little dazed and unbelieving in the face of his tremendous luck, helped by finding her so readily credulous to thinking it reasonably possible himself. He could not have done better than come to Dora for a correction of any undue exaltation that he might have felt, however. She supplied it in ten minutes by reminding him of their wisdom in keeping the secret of their relations. His engagement to the daughter of a prominent Conservative would not indeed have told in his favour with his party, to say nothing of the anomaly of Mr Milburn's unyielding opposition to the new policy. "I never knew Father so nearly bitter about anything," Dora said, a statement which left her lover thoughtful, but undaunted.

"We'll bring him round," said Lorne, "when he sees that the British manufacturer can't possibly get the better of men on the spot, who know to a nut the local requirements."

To which she had responded, "Oh, Lorne, don't begin THAT again," and he had gone away hot-foot for the first step of preparation.

"It's exactly what I should have expected," said Hesketh, when she told him. "Murchison is the very man they want. He's cut out for a political success. I saw that when he was in England."

"You haven't been very long in the country, Mr Hesketh, or we shouldn't hear you saying that," said Mr Milburn, amicably. "It's a very remarkable thing with us, a political party putting forward so young a man. Now with you I expect a young fellow might get in on his rank or his wealth—your principle of nonpayment of members confines your selection more or less. I don't say you're not right, but over here we do pay, you see, and it makes a lot of difference in the competition. It isn't a greater honour, but it's more sought for. I expect there'll be a good many sore heads over this business."

"It's all the more creditable to Murchison," said Hesketh.

"Of course it is—a great feather in his cap. Oh, I don't say young Murchison isn't a rising fellow, but it's foolishness for his party—I can't think who is responsible for it. However, they've got a pretty foolish platform just now—they couldn't win this seat on it with any man. A lesson will be good for them."

"Father, don't you think Lorne will get in?" asked Dora, in a tone of injury and slight resentment.

"Not by a handful," said her father. "Mr Walter Winter will represent South Fox in the next session of Parliament, if you ask my opinion."

"But, Father," returned his daughter with an outraged inflection, "you'll vote for Lorne?"

A smile went round the table, discreetest in Mrs Milburn.

"I'm afraid not," said Mr Milburn, "I'm afraid not. Sorry to disoblige, but principles are principles."

Dora perceptibly pouted. Mrs Milburn created a diversion with green-gage preserves. Under cover of it Hesketh asked, "Is he a great friend of yours?"

"One of my very greatest," Dora replied. "I know he'll expect Father to vote for him. It makes it awfully embarrassing for me."

"Oh, I fancy he'll understand!" said Hesketh, easily. "Political convictions are serious things, you know. Friendship isn't supposed to interfere with them. I wonder," he went on, meditatively, "whether I could be of any use to Murchison. Now that I've made up my mind to stop till after Christmas I'll be on hand for the fight. I've had some experience. I used to canvass now and then from Oxford; it was always a tremendous lark."

"Oh, Mr Hesketh, DO! Really and truly he is one of my oldest friends, and I should love to see him get in. I know his sister, too. They're a very clever family. Quite self-made, you know, but highly respected. Promise me you will."

"I promise with pleasure. And I wish it were something it would give me more trouble to perform. I like Murchison," said Hesketh.

All this transpiring while they were supposed to be eating green-gage preserves, and Mrs Milburn and Miss Filkin endeavoured to engage the head of the house in the kind of easy allusion to affairs of the moment to which Mr Hesketh would be accustomed as a form of conversation—the accident to the German Empress, the marriage of one of the Rothschilds. The ladies were compelled to supply most of the facts and all of the interest but they kept up a gallant line of attack; and the young man, taking gratified possession of Dora's eyes, was extremely obliged to them.

Hesketh lost no time in communicating his willingness to be of use to Murchison, and Lorne felt all his old friendliness rise up in him as he cordially accepted the offer. It was made with British heartiness, it was thoroughly meant. Lorne was half-ashamed in his recognition of its quality. A certain aloofness had grown in him against his will since Hesketh had prolonged his stay in the town, difficult to justify, impossible to define. Hesketh as Hesketh was worthily admirable as ever, wholesome and agreeable, as well turned out by his conscience as he was by his tailor; it was Hesketh in his relation to his new environment that seemed vaguely to come short. This in spite of an enthusiasm which was genuine enough; he found plenty of things to like about the country. It was perhaps in some manifestation of sensitiveness that he failed; he had the adaptability of the pioneer among rugged conditions, but he could not mingle quite immediately with the essence of them; he did not perceive the genius loci. Lorne had been conscious of this as a kind of undefined grievance; now he specified it and put it down to Hesketh's isolation among ways that were different from the ways he knew. You were bound to notice that Hesketh as a stranger had his own point of view, his own training to retreat upon.

"I certainly liked him better over there," Lorne told Advena, "but then he was a part of it—he wasn't separated out as he is here. He was just one sort of fellow that you admired, and there were lots of sorts that you admired more. Over here you seem to see round him somehow."

"I shouldn't have thought it difficult," said his sister.

"Besides," Lorne confessed, "I expect it was easier to like him when you were inclined to like everybody. A person feels more critical of a visitor, especially when he's had advantages," he added honestly. "I expect we don't care about having to acknowledge 'em so very much—that's what it comes to."

"I don't see them," said Advena. "Mr Hesketh seems well enough in his way, fairly intelligent and anxious to be pleasant. But I can't say I find him a specially interesting or valuable type."

"Interesting, you wouldn't. But valuable—well, you see, you haven't been in England—you haven't seen them over there, crowds of 'em, piling up the national character. Hesketh's an average, and for an average he's high. Oh, he's a good sort—and he just SMELLS of England."

"He seems all right in his politics," said John Murchison, filling his pipe from the tobacco jar on the mantelpiece. "But I doubt whether you'll find him much assistance the way he talks of. Folks over here know their own business—they've had to learn it. I doubt if they'll take showing from Hesketh."

"They might be a good deal worse advised."

"That may be," said Mr Murchison, and settled down in his armchair behind the Dominion.

"I agree with Father," said Advena. "He won't be any good, Lorne."

"Advena prefers Scotch," remarked Stella.

"I don't know. He's full of the subject," said Lorne. "He can present it from the other side."

"The side of the British exporter?" inquired his father, looking over the top of the Dominion with unexpected humour.

"No, sir. Though there are places where we might talk cheap overcoats and tablecloths and a few odds and ends like that. The side of the all-British loaf and the lot of people there are to eat it," said Lorne. "That ought to make a friendly feeling. And if there's anything in the sentiment of the scheme," he added, "it shouldn't do any harm to have a good specimen of the English people advocating it. Hesketh ought to be an object-lesson."

"I wouldn't put too much faith in the object-lesson," said John Murchison.

"Neither would I," said Stella emphatically. "Mister Alfred Hesketh may pass in an English crowd, but over here he's just an ignorant young man, and you'd better not have him talking with his mouth at any of your meetings. Tell him to go and play with Walter Winter."

"I heard he was asking at Volunteer Headquarters the other night," remarked Alec, "how long it would be before a man like himself, if he threw in his lot with the country, could expect to get nominated for a provincial seat."

"What did they tell him?" asked Mr Murchison, when they had finished their laugh.

"I heard they said it would depend a good deal on the size of the lot."

"And a little on the size of the man," remarked Advena.

"He said he would be willing to take a seat in a Legislature and work up," Alec went on. "Ontario for choice, because he thought the people of this Province more advanced."

"There's a representative committee being formed to give the inhabitants of the poor-house a turkey dinner on Thanksgiving Day," said Advena. "He might begin with that."

"I dare say he would if anybody told him. He's just dying to be taken into the public service," Alec said. "He's in dead earnest about it. He thinks this country's a great place because it gives a man the chance of a public career."

"Why is it," asked Advena "that when people have no capacity for private usefulness they should be so anxious to serve the public?"

"Oh, come," said Lorne, "Hesketh has an income of his own. Why should he sweat for his living? We needn't pride ourselves on being so taken up with getting ours. A man like that is in a position to do some good, and I hope Hesketh will get a chance if he stays over here. We'll soon see how he speaks. He's going to follow Farquharson at Jordanville on Thursday week."

"I wonder at Farquharson," said his father.

By this time the candidature of Mr Lorne Murchison was well in the public eye. The Express announced it in a burst of beaming headlines, with a biographical sketch and a "cut" of its young fellow-townsman. Horace Williams, whose hand was plain in every line apologized for the brevity of the biography—quality rather than quantity, he said; it was all good, and time would make it better. This did not prevent the Mercury observing the next evening that the Liberal organ had omitted to state the age at which the new candidate was weaned. The Toronto papers commented according to their party bias, but so far as the candidate was concerned there was lack of the material of criticism. If he had achieved little for praise he had achieved nothing for detraction. There was no inconsistent public utterance, no doubtful transaction, no scandalous paper to bring forward to his detriment. When the fact that he was but twenty-eight years of age had been exhausted in elaborate ridicule, little more was available. The policy he championed, however, lent itself to the widest discussion, and it was instructive to note how the Opposition press, while continuing to approve the great principle involved, found material for gravest criticism in the Government's projected application of it. Interest increased in the South Fox by-election as its first touchstone, and gathered almost romantically about Lorne Murchison as its spirited advocate. It was commonly said that whether he was returned or not on this occasion, his political future was assured; and his name was carried up and down the Dominion with every new wind of imperial doctrine that blew across the Atlantic. He himself felt splendidly that he rode upon the crest of a wave of history. However the event appeared which was hidden beyond the horizon, the great luck of that buoyant emotion, of that thrilling suspense, would be his in a very special way. He was exhilarated by the sense of crisis, and among all the conferences and calculations that armed him for his personal struggle, he would now and then breathe in his private soul, "Choose quickly, England," like a prayer.

Elgin rose to its liking for the fellow, and even his political enemies felt a half-humorous pride that the town had produced a candidate whose natural parts were held to eclipse the age and experience of party hacks. Plenty of them were found to declare that Lorne Murchison would poll more votes for the Grits than any other man they could lay their hands on, with the saving clause that neither he nor any other man could poll quite enough this time. They professed to be content to let the issue have it; meanwhile they congratulated Lorne on his chance, telling him that a knock or two wouldn't do him any harm at his age. Walter Winter, who hadn't been on speaking terms with Farquharson, made a point of shaking hands with Murchison in the publicity of the post-office, and assuring him that he, Winter, never went into a contest more confident of the straight thing on the part of the other side. Such cavilling as there was came from the organized support of his own party and had little importance because it did. The grumblers fell into line almost as soon as Horace Williams said they would; a little oil, one small appointment wrung from the Ontario Government—Fawkes, I believe, got it—and the machine was again in good working order. Lorne even profited, in the opinion of many, by the fact of his youth, with its promise of energy and initiative, since Mr Farquharson had lately been showing the defects as well as the qualities of age and experience, and the charge of servile timidity was already in the mouths of his critics.

The agricultural community took it, as usual, with phlegm; but there was a distinct tendency in the bar at Barker's, on market-days, to lay money on the colt.



CHAPTER XXIV

Mr Farquharson was to retain his seat until the early spring, for the double purpose of maintaining his influence upon an important commission of which he was chairman until the work should be done, and of giving the imperial departure championed by his successor as good a chance as possible of becoming understood in the constituency. It was understood that the new writ would issue for a date in March; Elgin referred all interest to that point, and prophesied for itself a lively winter. Another event, of importance less general, was arranged for the end of February—the arrival of Miss Cameron and Mrs Kilbannon from Scotland. Finlay had proposed an earlier date, but matters of business connected with her mother's estate would delay Miss Cameron's departure. Her arrival would be the decisive point of another campaign. He and Advena faced it without misgiving, but there were moments when Finlay greatly wished the moment past.

Their intimacy had never been conspicuous, and their determination to make no change in it could be carried out without attracting attention. It was very dear to them, that determination. They saw it as a test, as an ideal. Last of all, perhaps, as an alleviation. They were both too much encumbered with ideas to move simply, quickly, on the impulse of passion. They looked at it through the wrong end of the glass, and thought they put it farther away. They believed that their relation comprised, would always comprise, the best of life. It was matter for discussion singularly attractive; they allowed themselves upon it wide scope in theory. They could speak of it in the heroic temper, without sadness or bitterness; the thing was to tear away the veil and look fate in the face. The great thing, perhaps, was to speak of it while still they could give themselves leave; a day would arrive, they acknowledged with averted eyes, when dumbness would be more becoming. Meanwhile, Mrs Murchison would have found it hard to sustain her charge against them that they talked of nothing but books and authors; the philosophy of life, as they were intensely creating it, was more entrancing than any book or any author. Simply and definitely, and to their own satisfaction, they had abandoned the natural demands of their state; they lived in its exaltation and were far from accidents. Deep in both of them was a kind of protective nobility; I will not say it cost them nothing, but it turned the scenes between them into comedy of the better sort, the kind that deserves the relief of stone or bronze. Advena, had she heard it, would have repelled Dr Drummond's warning with indignation. If it were so possible to keep their friendship on an unfaltering level then, with the latitude they had, what danger could attend them later, when the social law would support them, divide them, protect them? Dr Drummond, suspecting all, looked grimly on, and from November to March found no need to invite Mr Finlay to occupy the pulpit of Knox Church.

They had come to full knowledge that night of their long walk in the dark together; but even then, in the rush and shock and glory of it, they had held apart; and their broken avowals had crossed with difficulty from one to the other. The whole fabric of circumstance was between them, to realize and to explore; later surveys, as we know, had not reduced it. They gave it great credit as a barrier; I suppose because it kept them out of each other's arms. It had done that.

It was Advena, I fear, who insisted most that they should continue upon terms of happy debt to one another, the balance always changing, the account never closed and rendered. She no doubt felt that she might impose the terms; she had unconsciously the sense of greater sacrifice, and knew that she had been mistress of the situation long before he was aware of it. He agreed with joy and with misgiving; he saw with enthusiasm her high conception of their alliance, but sometimes wondered, poor fellow, whether he was right in letting it cover him. He came to the house as he had done before, as often as he could, and reproached himself that he could not, after all, come very often.

That they should discuss their relation as candidly as they sustained it was perhaps a little peculiar to them, so I have laid stress on it; but it was not by any means their sole preoccupation. They talked like tried friends of their every-day affairs. Indeed, after the trouble and intoxication of their great understanding had spent itself, it was the small practical interests of life that seemed to hold them most. One might think that Nature, having made them her invitation upon the higher plane, abandoned them in the very scorn of her success to the warm human commonplaces that do her work well enough with the common type. Mrs Murchison would have thought better of them if she had chanced again to overhear.

"I wouldn't advise you to have it lined with fur," Advena was saying. The winter had sharply announced itself, and Finlay, to her reproach about his light overcoat, had declared his intention of ordering a buffalo-skin the following day. "And the buffaloes are all gone, you know—thirty years ago," she laughed. "You really are not modern in practical matters. Does it ever surprise you that you get no pemmican for dinner, and hardly ever meet an Indian in his feathers?"

He looked at her with delight in his sombre eyes. It was a new discovery, her capacity for happily chaffing him, only revealed since she had come out of her bonds to love; it was hard to say which of them took the greater pleasure in it.

"What is the use of living in Canada if you can't have fur on your clothes?" he demanded.

"You may have a little—astrakhan, I would—on the collar and cuffs," she said. "A fur lining is too hot if there happens to be a thaw, and then you would leave it off and take cold. You have all the look," she added, with a gravely considering glance at him, "of a person who ought to take care of his chest."

He withdrew his eyes hurriedly, and fixed them instead on his pipe. He always brought it with him, by her order, and Advena usually sewed. He thought as he watched her that it made the silences enjoyable.

"And expensive, I dare say, too," he said.

"Yes, more or less. Alec paid fifty dollars for his, and never liked it."

"Fifty dollars—ten pounds! No vair for me!" he declared. "By the way, Mrs Firmin is threatening to turn me out of house and home. A married daughter is coming to live with her, and she wants my rooms."

"When does she come—the married daughter?"

"Oh, not till the early spring! There's no immediate despair," said Finlay, "but it is dislocating. My books and I had just succeeded in making room for one another."

"But you will have to move, in any case, in the early spring."

"I suppose I will. I had—I might have remembered that."

"Have you found a house yet?" Advena asked him.

"No."

"Have you been looking?" It was a gentle, sensible reminder.

"I'm afraid I haven't." He moved in his chair as if in physical discomfort. "Do you think I ought—so soon? There are always plenty of—houses, aren't there?"

"Not plenty of desirable ones. Do you think you must live in East Elgin?"

"It would be rather more convenient."

"Because there are two semidetached in River Street, just finished, that look very pretty and roomy. I thought when I saw them that one of them might be what you would like."

"Thank you," he said, and tried not to say it curtly.

"They belong to White, the grocer. River Street isn't East Elgin, but it is that way, and it would be a great deal pleasanter for—for her."

"I must consider that, of course. You haven't been in them? I should hope for a bright sitting-room, and a very private study."

If Advena was aware of any unconscious implication, the pair of eyes she turned upon him showed no trace of satisfaction in it.

"No, I haven't. But if I could be of any use I should be very glad to go over them with you, and—"

She stopped involuntarily, checked by the embarrassment in his face, though she had to wait for his words to explain it.

"I should be most grateful. But—but might it not be misunderstood?"

She bent her head over her work, and one of those instants passed between them which he had learned to dread. They were so completely the human pair as they sat together, withdrawn in comfort and shelter, absorbed in homely matters and in each other; it was easy to forget that they were only a picture, a sham, and that the reality lay further on, in the early spring. It must have been hard for him to hear without resentment that she was ready to help him to make a home for that reality. He was fast growing instructed in women, although by a post-graduate course.

Advena looked up. "Possibly," she said, calmly, and their agitation lay still between them. He was silently angry; the thing that stirred without their leave had been sweet.

"No," said Advena, "I can't go, I suppose. I'm sorry. I should have liked so much to be of use." She looked up at him appealingly, and sudden tears came and stood in her eyes, and would perhaps have undone his hurt but that he was staring into the fire.

"How can you be of use," he said, almost irritably, "in such ways as those? They are not important, and I am not sure that for us they are legitimate. If you were about to be—married"—he seemed to plunge at the word—"I should not wish either to hasten you or to house you. I should turn my back on it all. You should have nothing from me," he went on, with a forced smile, "but my blessing, delivered over my shoulder."

"I am sure they are not important," she said humbly—privately all unwilling to give up her martyrdom, "but surely they are legitimate. I would like to help you in every little way I can. Don't you like me in your life? You have said that I may stay."

"I believe you think that by taking strong measures one can exorcise things," he said. "That if we could only write out this history of ours in our hearts' blood it would somehow vanish."

"No," she said, "but I should like to do it all the same."

"You must bear with me if I refuse the heroic in little. It is even harder than the other." He broke off, leaning back and looking at her from under his shading hand as if that might protect him from too complete a vision. The firelight was warm on her cheek and hair, her needle once again completed the dear delusion: she sat there, his wife. This was an aspect he forbade, but it would return; here it was again.

"It is good to have you in my life," he said. "It is also good to recognize one's possibilities."

"How can you definitely lose me?" she asked, and he shook his head.

"I don't know. Now that I have found you it is as if you and I had been rocked together on the tide of that inconceivable ocean that casts us half-awake upon life," he said dreamily. "It isn't friendship of ideas, it's a friendship of spirit. Indeed, I hope and pray never wholly to lose that."

"You never will," she told him. "How many worlds one lives in as the day goes by with the different people one cares for—one beyond the other, concentric, ringing from the heart! Yours comprises all the others; it lies the farthest out—and alas! at present, the closest in," she added irresistibly to the asking of his eyes.

"But," she hurried on, taking high ground to remedy her indiscretion, "I look forward to the time when this—other feeling of ours will become just an idea, as it is now just an emotion, at which we should try to smile. It is the attitude of the gods."

"And therefore not becoming to men. Why should we, not being gods. borrow their attitude?" said Finlay.

"I could never kill it," she put her work in her lap to say, "by any sudden act of violence. It would seem a kind of suicide. While it rules it is like one's life—absolute. But to isolate it—to place it beyond the currents from the heart—to look at it, and realize it, and conquer it for what it is—I don't think it need take so very long. And then our friendship will be beautiful without reproach."

"I sometimes fear there may not be time enough in life," he said. "And if I find that I must simply go—to British Columbia, I think—those mining missions would give a man his chance against himself. There is splendid work to be done there, of a rough-and-ready kind that would make it puerile to spend time in self-questioning."

She smiled as if at a violent boy. "We can do it. We can do it here," she said. "May I quote another religion to you? 'From purification there arises in the Yogi a thorough discernment of the cause and nature of the body, whereupon he loses that regard which others have for the bodily form.' Then, if he loves, he loves in spirit and in truth. I look forward to the time," she went on calmly, "when the best that I can give you or you can give me will ride upon a glance."

"I used to feel more drawn to the ascetic achievement and its rewards," he remarked thoughtfully, "than I do now."

"If I were not a Presbyterian in Canada," she told him, "I would be a Buddhist in Burma. But I have inherited the Shorter Catechism; I must remain without the Law."

Finlay smiled. "They are the simple," he said. "Our Law makes wise the simple."

Advena looked for a moment into the fire. She was listening, with admiration, to her heart; she would not be led to consider esoteric contrasts of East and West.

"Isn't there something that appeals to you," she said, "in the thought of just leaving it, all unsaid and all undone, a dear and tender projection upon the future that faded—a lovely thing we turned away from, until one day it was no longer there?"

"Charming," he said, averting his eyes so that she should not see the hunger in them. "Charming—literature!"

She smiled and sighed, and he wrenched his mind to the consideration of the Buddhism of Browning. She followed him obediently, but the lines they wanted did not come easily; they were compelled to search and verify. Something lately seemed lost to them of that kind of glad activity; he was more aware of it than she, since he was less occupied in the aesthetic ecstasy of self-torture. In the old time before the sun rose they had been so conscious of realms of idea lying just beyond the achievement of thought, approachable, visible by phrases, brokenly, realms which they could see closer when they essayed together. He constantly struggled to reach those enchanted areas again, but they seemed to have gone down behind the horizon; and the only inspiration that carried them far drew its impetus from the poetry of their plight. They looked for verses to prove that Browning's imagination carried him bravely through lives and lives to come, and found them to speculate whether in such chances they might hope to meet again.

And the talk came back to his difficulties with his Board of Management, and to her choice of a frame for the etching he had given her, by his friend the Glasgow impressionist, and to their opinion of a common acquaintance, and to Lorne and his prospects. He told her how little she resembled her brother, and where they diverged, and how; and she listened with submission and delight, enchanted to feel his hand upon her intimate nature. She lingered in the hall while he got into his overcoat, and saw that a glove was the worse for wear. "Would it be the heroic-in-little," she begged, "to let me mend that?"

As he went out alone into the winter streets he too drew upon a pagan for his admonition. "'What then art thou doing here, O imagination?'" he groaned in his private heart. "'Go away, I entreat thee by the gods, for I want thee not. But thou art come again according to thy old fashion. I am not angry with thee, only go away!'"



CHAPTER XXV

Miss Milburn pressed her contention that the suspicion of his desire would be bad for her lover's political prospects till she made him feel his honest passion almost a form of treachery to his party. She also hinted that, for the time being, it did not make particularly for her own comfort in the family circle, Mr Milburn having grown by this time quite bitter. She herself drew the excitement of intrigue from the situation, which she hid behind her pretty, pale, decorous features, and never betrayed by the least of her graceful gestures. She told herself that she had never been so right about anything as about that affair of the ring—imagine, for an instant, if she had been wearing it now! She would have banished Lorne altogether if she could. As he insisted on an occasional meeting, she clothed it in mystery, appointing it for an evening when her mother and aunt were out, and answering his ring at the door herself. To her family she remarked with detachment that you saw hardly anything of Lorne Murchison now, he was so taken up with his old election; and to Hesketh she confided her fear that politics did interfere with friendship, whatever he might say. He said a good deal, he cited lofty examples; but the only agreement he could get from her was the hope that the estrangement wouldn't be permanent.

"But you are going to say something, Lorne," she insisted, talking of the Jordanville meeting.

"Not much," he told her. "It's the safest district we've got, and they adore old Farquharson. He'll do most of the talking—they wouldn't thank me for taking up the time. Farquharson is going to tell them I'm a first-class man, and they couldn't do better, and I've practically only to show my face and tell them I think so too."

"But Mr Hesketh will speak?"

"Yes; we thought it would be a good chance of testing him. He may interest them, and he can't do much harm, anyhow."

"Lorne, I should simply love to go. It's your first meeting."

"I'll take you."

"Mr Murchison, HAVE you taken leave of your senses? Really, you are—"

"All right, I'll send you. Farquharson and I are going out to the Crow place to supper, but Hesketh is driving straight there. He'll be delighted to bring you—who wouldn't?"

"I shouldn't be allowed to go with him alone," said Dora, thoughtfully.

"Well, no. I don't know that I'd approve of that myself," laughed the confident young man. "Hesketh is driving Mrs Farquharson, and the cutter will easily hold three. Isn't it lucky there's sleighing?"

"Mother couldn't object to that," said Dora. "Lorne, I always said you were the dearest fellow! I'll wear a thick veil, and not a soul will know me."

"Not a soul would in any case," said Lorne. "It'll be a Jordanville crowd, you know—nobody from Elgin."

"We don't visit much in Jordanville, certainly. Well, Mother mayn't object. She has a great idea of Mrs Farquharson, because she has attended eleven Drawing-Rooms at Ottawa, and one of them was given—held, I should say—by the Princess Louise."

"I won't promise you eleven," said Lorne, "but there seems to be a pretty fair chance of one or two."

At this she had a tale for him which charmed his ears. "I didn't know where to look," she said. "Aunt Emmie, you know, has a very bad trick of coming into my room without knocking. Well, in she walked last night, and found me before the glass PRACTISING MY CURTSEY! I could have killed her. Pretended she thought I was out."

"Dora, would you like ME to promise something?" he asked, with a mischievous look.

"Of course, I would. I don't care how much YOU promise. What?"

But already he repented of his daring, and sat beside her suddenly conscious and abashed. Nor could any teasing prevail to draw from him what had been on his audacious lips to say.

Social precedents are easily established in the country. The accident that sent the first Liberal canvasser for Jordanville votes to the Crow place for his supper would be hard to discover now; the fact remains that he has been going there ever since. It made a greater occasion than Mrs Crow would ever have dreamed of acknowledging. She saw to it that they had a good meal of victuals, and affected indifference to the rest; they must say their say, she supposed. If the occasion had one satisfaction which she came nearer to confessing than another, it was that the two or three substantial neighbours who usually came to meet the politicians left their wives at home, and that she herself, to avoid giving any offence on this score, never sat down with the men. Quite enough to do it was, she would explain later, for her and the hired girl to wait on them and to clear up after them. She and Bella had their bite afterward when the men had hitched up, and when they could exchange comments of proud congratulation upon the inroads on the johnny-cake or the pies. So there was no ill feeling, and Mrs Crow, having vindicated her dignity by shaking hands with the guests of the evening in the parlour, solaced it further by maintaining the masculine state of the occasion, in spite of protests or entreaties. To sit down opposite Mr Crow would have made it ordinary "company"; she passed the plates and turned it into a function.

She was waiting for them on the parlour sofa when Crow brought them in out of the nipping early dark of December, Elmore staying behind in the yard with the horses. She sat on the sofa in her best black dress with the bead trimming on the neck and sleeves, a good deal pushed up and wrinkled across the bosom, which had done all that would ever be required of it when it gave Elmore and Abe their start in life. Her wiry hands were crossed in her lap in the moment of waiting: you could tell by the look of them that they were not often crossed there. They were strenuous hands; the whole worn figure was strenuous, and the narrow set mouth, and the eyes which had looked after so many matters for so long, and even the way the hair was drawn back into a knot in a fashion that would have given a phrenologist his opportunity. It was a different Mrs Crow from the one that sat in the midst of her poultry and garden-stuff in the Elgin market square; but it was even more the same Mrs Crow, the sum of a certain measure of opportunity and service, an imperial figure in her bead trimming, if the truth were known.

The room was heated to express the geniality that was harder to put in words. The window was shut; there was a smell of varnish and whatever was inside the "suite" of which Mrs Crow occupied the sofa. Enlarged photographs—very much enlarged—of Mr and Mrs Crow hung upon the walls, and one other of a young girl done in that process which tells you at once that she was an only daughter and that she is dead. There had been other bereavements; they were written upon the silver coffin-plates which, framed and glazed, also contributed to the decoration of the room; but you would have had to look close, and you might feel a delicacy.

Mrs Crow made her greetings with precision, and sat down again upon the sofa for a few minutes' conversation.

"I'm telling them," said her husband, "that the sleighin's just held out for them. If it 'ud been tomorrow they'd have had to come on wheels. Pretty soft travellin' as it was, some places, I guess."

"Snow's come early this year," said Mrs Crow. "It was an open fall, too."

"It has certainly," Mr Farquharson backed her up. "About as early as I remember it. I don't know how much you got out here; we had a good foot in Elgin."

"'Bout the same, 'bout the same," Mr Crow deliberated, "but it's been layin' light all along over Clayfield way—ain't had a pair of runners out, them folks."

"Makes a more cheerful winter, Mrs Crow, don't you think, when it comes early?" remarked Lorne. "Or would you rather not get it till after Christmas?"

"I don't know as it matters much, out here in the country. We don't get a great many folks passin', best of times. An' it's more of a job to take care of the stock."

"That's so," Mr Crow told them. "Chores come heavier when there's snow on the ground, a great sight, especially if there's drifts."

And for an instant, with his knotted hands hanging between his knees he pondered this unvarying aspect of his yearly experience. They all pondered it, sympathetic.

"Well, now, Mr Farquharson," Mrs Crow turned to him. "An' how reely BE ye? We've heard better, an' worse, an' middlin'—there's ben such contradictory reports."

"Oh, very well, Mrs Crow. Never better. I'm going to give a lot more trouble yet. I can't do it in politics, that's the worst of it. But here's the man that's going to do it for me. Here's the man!"

The Crows looked at the pretendant, as in duty bound, but not any longer than they could help.

"Why, I guess you were at school with Elmore?" said Crow, as if the idea had just struck him.

"He may be right peart, for all that," said Elmore's mother, and Elmore, himself, entering with two leading Liberals of Jordanville, effected a diversion, under cover of which Mrs Crow escaped, to superintend, with Bella, the last touches to the supper in the kitchen.

Politics in and about Jordanville were accepted as a purely masculine interest. If you had asked Mrs Crow to take a hand in them she would have thanked you with sarcasm, and said she thought she had about enough to do as it was. The school-house, on the night of such a meeting as this, was recognized to be no place for ladies. It was a man's affair, left to the men, and the appearance there of the other sex would have been greeted with remark and levity. Elgin, as we know, was more sophisticated in every way, plenty of ladies attended political meetings in the Drill Shed, where seats as likely as not would be reserved for them; plenty of handkerchiefs waved there for the encouragement of the hero of the evening. They did not kiss him; British phlegm, so far, had stayed that demonstration at the southern border.

The ladies of Elgin, however, drew the line somewhere, drew it at country meetings. Mrs Farquharson went with her husband because, since his state of health had handed him over to her more than ever, she saw it a part of her wifely duty. His retirement had been decided upon for the spring, but she would be on hand to retire him at any earlier moment should the necessity arise. "We'll be the only female creatures there, my dear," she had said to Dora on the way out, and Hesketh had praised them both for public spirit. He didn't know, he said, how anybody would get elected in England without the ladies, especially in the villages, where the people were obliged to listen respectfully.

"I wonder you can afford to throw away all the influence you get in the rural districts with soup and blankets," he said; "but this is an extravagant country in many ways." Dora kept silence, not being sure of the social prestige bound up with the distribution of soup and blankets, but Mrs Farquharson set him sharply right.

"I guess we'd rather do without our influence if it came to that," she said.

Hesketh listened with deference to her account of the rural district which had as yet produced no Ladies Bountiful, made mental notes of several points, and placed her privately as a woman of more than ordinary intelligence. I have always claimed for Hesketh an open mind; he was filling it now, to its capacity, with care and satisfaction.

The schoolroom was full and waiting when they arrived. Jordanville had been well billed, and the posters held, in addition to the conspicuous names of Farquharson and Murchison, that of Mr Alfred Hesketh (of London, England). There was a "send-off" to give to the retiring member, there was a critical inspection to make of the new candidate, and there was Mr Alfred Hesketh, of London, England, and whatever he might signify. They were big, quiet, expectant fellows, with less sophistication and polemic than their American counterparts, less stolid aggressiveness than their parallels in England, if they have parallels there. They stood, indeed, for the development between the two; they came of the new country but not of the new light; they were democrats who had never thrown off the monarch—what harm did he do there overseas? They had the air of being prosperous, but not prosperous enough for theories and doctrines. The Liberal vote of South Fox had yet to be split by Socialism or Labour. Life was a decent rough business that required all their attention; there was time enough for sleep but not much for speculation. They sat leaning forward with their hats dropped between their knees, more with the air of big schoolboys expecting an entertainment than responsible electors come together to approve their party's choice. They had the uncomplaining bucolic look, but they wore it with a difference; the difference, by this time, was enough to mark them of another nation. Most of them had driven to the meeting; it was not an adjournment from the public house. Nor did the air hold any hint of beer. Where it had an alcoholic drift the flavour was of whisky; but the stimulant of the occasion had been tea or cider, and the room was full of patient good will.

The preliminaries were gone through with promptness; the Chair had supped with the speakers, and Mr Crow had given him a friendly hint that the boys wouldn't be expecting much in the way of trimmings from HIM. Stamping and clapping from the back benches greeted Mr Farquharson. It diminished, grew more subdued, as it reached the front. The young fellows were mostly at the back, and the power of demonstration had somehow ebbed in the old ones. The retiring member addressed his constituents for half an hour. He was standing before them as their representative for the last time, and it was natural to look back and note the milestones behind, the changes for the better with which he could fairly claim association. They were matters of Federal business chiefly, beyond the immediate horizon of Jordanville, but Farquharson made them a personal interest for that hour at all events, and there were one or two points of educational policy which he could illustrate by their own schoolhouse. He approached them, as he had always done on the level of mutual friendly interest, and in the hope of doing mutual friendly business. "You know and I know," he said more than once; they and he knew a number of things together.

He was afraid, he said, that if the doctors hadn't chased him out of politics, he never would have gone. Now, however, that they gave him no choice, he was glad to think that though times had been pretty good for the farmers of South Fox all through the eleven years of his appearance in the political arena, he was leaving it at a moment when they promised to be better still. Already, he was sure, they were familiar with the main heads of that attractive prospect and, agreeable as the subject, great as the policy was to him, he would leave it to be further unfolded by the gentleman whom they all hoped to enlist in the cause, as his successor for this constituency, Mr Lorne Murchison, and by his friend from the old country, Mr Alfred Hesketh. He, Farquharson, would not take the words out of the mouths of these gentlemen, much as he envied them the opportunity of uttering them. The French Academy, he told them, that illustrious body of literary and scientific men, had a custom, on the death of a member and the selection of his successor, of appointing one of their number to eulogize the newcomer. The person upon whom the task would most appropriately fall, did circumstances permit, would be the departing academician. In this case, he was happy to say, circumstances did permit—his political funeral was still far enough off to enable him to express his profound confidence in and his hearty admiration of the young and vigorous political heir whom the Liberals of South Fox had selected to stand in his shoes. Mr Farquharson proceeded to give his grounds for this confidence and admiration, reminding the Jordanville electors that they had met Mr Murchison as a Liberal standard-bearer in the last general election, when he, Farquharson, had to acknowledge very valuable services on Mr Murchison's part. The retiring member then thanked his audience for the kind attention and support they had given him for so many years, made a final cheerful joke about a Pagan divinity known as Anno Domini, and took his seat.

They applauded him, and it was plain that they regretted him, the tried friend, the man there was never any doubt about, whose convictions they had repeated, and whose speeches in Parliament they had read with a kind of proprietorship for so long. The Chair had to wait, before introducing Mr Alfred Hesketh, until the backbenchers had got through with a double rendering of "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow," which bolder spirits sent lustily forth from the anteroom where the little girls kept their hats and comforters, interspersed with whoops. Hesketh, it had been arranged, should speak next, and Lorne last.

Mr Hesketh left his wooden chair with smiling ease, the ease which is intended to level distinctions and put everybody concerned on the best of terms. He said that though he was no stranger to the work of political campaigns, this was the first time that he had had the privilege of addressing a colonial audience. "I consider," said he handsomely, "that it is a privilege." He clasped his hands behind his back and threw out his chest.

"Opinions have differed in England as to the value of the colonies, and the consequence of colonials. I say here with pride that I have ever been among those who insist that the value is very high and the consequence very great. The fault is common to humanity, but we are, I fear, in England, too prone to be led away by appearances, and to forget that under a rough unpolished exterior may beat virtues which are the brightest ornaments of civilization, that in the virgin fields of the possessions which the good swords of our ancestors wrung for us from the Algonquins and the—and the other savages—may be hidden the most glorious period of the British race."

Mr Hesketh paused and coughed. His audience neglected the opportunity for applause, but he had their undivided attention. They were looking at him and listening to him, these Canadian farmers, with curious interest in his attitude, his appearance, his inflection, his whole personality as it offered itself to them—it was a thing new and strange. Far out in the Northwest, where the emigrant trains had been unloading all the summer, Hesketh's would have been a voice from home; but here, in long-settled Ontario, men had forgotten the sound of it, with many other things. They listened in silence, weighing with folded arms, appraising with chin in hand; they were slow, equitable men.

"If we in England," Hesketh proceeded, "required a lesson—as perhaps we did—in the importance of the colonies, we had it; need I remind you? in the course of the late protracted campaign in South Africa. Then did the mother country indeed prove the loyalty and devotion of her colonial sons. Then were envious nations compelled to see the spectacle of Canadians and Australians rallying about the common flag, eager to attest their affection for it with their life-blood, and to demonstrate that they, too, were worthy to add deeds to British traditions and victories to the British cause."

Still no mark of appreciation. Hesketh began to think them an unhandsome lot. He stood bravely, however, by the note he had sounded. He dilated on the pleasure and satisfaction it had been to the people of England to receive this mark of attachment from far-away dominions and dependencies, on the cementing of the bonds of brotherhood by the blood of the fallen, on the impossibility that the mother country should ever forget such voluntary sacrifices for her sake, when, unexpectedly and irrelevantly, from the direction of the cloakroom, came the expressive comment "Yah!"

Though brief, nothing could have been more to the purpose, and Hesketh sacrificed several effective points to hurry to the quotation—

What should they know of England Who only England know?

which he could not, perhaps, have been expected to forbear. His audience, however, were plainly not in the vein for compliment. The same voice from the anteroom inquired ironically, "That so?" and the speaker felt advised to turn to more immediate considerations.

He said he had had the great pleasure on his arrival in this country to find a political party, the party in power, their Canadian Liberal party, taking initiative in a cause which he was sure they all had at heart—the strengthening of the bonds between the colonies and the mother country. He congratulated the Liberal party warmly upon having shown themselves capable of this great function—a point at which he was again interrupted; and he recapitulated some of the familiar arguments about the desirability of closer union from the point of view of the army, of the Admiralty, and from one which would come home, he knew, to all of them, the necessity of a dependable food supply for the mother country in time of war. Here he quoted a noble lord. He said that he believed no definite proposals had been made, and he did not understand how any definite proposals could be made; for his part, if the new arrangement was to be in the nature of a bargain, he would prefer to have nothing to do with it.

"England," he said, loftily, "has no wish to buy the loyalty of her colonies, nor, I hope, has any colony the desire to offer her allegiance at the price of preference in British markets. Even proposals for mutual commercial benefit may be underpinned, I am glad to say, by loftier principles than those of the market-place and the counting-house."

At this one of his hearers, unacquainted with the higher commercial plane, exclaimed, "How be ye goin' to get 'em kept to, then?"

Hesketh took up the question. He said a friend in the audience asked how they were to ensure that such arrangements would be adhered to. His answer was in the words of the Duke of Dartmoor, "By the mutual esteem, the inherent integrity, and the willing compromise of the British race."

Here someone on the back benches, impatient, doubtless, at his own incapacity to follow this high doctrine, exclaimed intemperately, "Oh, shut up!" and the gathering, remembering that this, after all, was not what it had come for, began to hint that it had had enough in intermittent stamps and uncompromising shouts for "Murchison!"

Hesketh kept on his legs, however, a few minutes longer. He had a trenchant sentence to repeat to them which he thought they would take as a direct message from the distinguished nobleman who had uttered it. The Marquis of Aldeburgh was the father of the pithy thing, which he had presented, as it happened, to Hesketh himself. The audience received it with respect—Hesketh's own respect was so marked—but with misapprehension; there had been too many allusions to the nobility for a community so far removed from its soothing influence. "Had ye no friends among the commoners?" suddenly spoke up a dry old fellow, stroking a long white beard; and the roar that greeted this showed the sense of the meeting. Hesketh closed with assurances of the admiration and confidence he felt toward the candidate proposed to their suffrages by the Liberal party that were quite inaudible, and sought his yellow pinewood schoolroom chair with rather a forced smile. It had been used once before that day to isolate conspicuous stupidity.

They were at bottom a good-natured and a loyal crowd, and they had not, after all, come there to make trouble, or Mr Alfred Hesketh might have carried away a worse opinion of them. As it was, young Murchison, whose address occupied the rest of the evening, succeeded in making an impression upon them distinct enough, happily for his personal influence, to efface that of his friend. He did it by the simple expedient of talking business, and as high prices for produce and low ones for agricultural implements would be more interesting there than here, I will not report him. He and Mr Farquharson waited, after the meeting, for a personal word with a good many of those present, but it was suggested to Hesketh that the ladies might be tired, and that he had better get them home without unnecessary delay. Mrs Farquharson had less comment to offer during the drive home than Hesketh thought might be expected from a woman of her intelligence, but Miss Milburn was very enthusiastic. She said he had made a lovely speech, and she wished her father could have heard it.

A personal impression, during a time of political excitement, travels unexpectedly far. A week later Mr Hesketh was concernedly accosted in Main Street by a boy on a bicycle.

"Say, mister, how's the dook?"

"What duke?" asked Hesketh, puzzled.

"Oh, any dook," responded the boy, and bicycled cheerfully, away.



CHAPTER XXVI

Christmas came and went. Dr Drummond had long accepted the innovation of a service on Christmas Day, as he agreed to the anthem while the collection was being taken up, to flowers about the pulpit, and to the habit of sitting at prayer. He was a progressive by his business instinct, in everything but theology, where perhaps his business instinct also operated the other way, in favour of the sure thing. The Christmas Day service soon became one of those "special" occasions so dear to his heart, which made a demand upon him out of the ordinary way. He rose to these on the wing of the eagle, and his congregation never lacked the lesson that could be most dramatically drawn from them. His Christmas Day discourse gathered everything into it that could emphasize the anniversary, including a vigorous attack upon the saints' days and ceremonies of the Church of England calculated to correct the concession of the service, and pull up sharply any who thought that Presbyterianism was giving way to the spurious attractions of sentimentality or ritual. The special Easter service, with every appropriate feature of hymn and invocation, was apt to be marked by an unsparing denunciation of the pageants and practices of the Church of Rome. Balance was thus preserved, and principle relentlessly indicated.

Dr Drummond loved, as I have said, all that asked for notable comment; the poet and the tragedian in him caught at the opportunity, and revelled in it. Public events carried him far, especially if they were disastrous, but what he most profited by was the dealing of Providence with members of his own congregation. Of all the occasions that inspired him, the funeral sermon was his happiest opportunity, nor was it, in his hands, by any means unstinted eulogy. Candid was his summing-up, behind the decent veil, the accepted apology of death; he was not afraid to refer to the follies of youth or the weaknesses of age in terms as unmistakable as they were kindly.

"Grace," he said once, of an estimable plain spinster who had passed away, "did more for her than ever nature had done." He repeated it, too. "She was far more indebted, I say, to grace, than to nature," and before his sharp earnestness none were seen to smile. Nor could you forget the note in his voice when the loss he deplored was that of a youth of virtue and promise, or that of a personal friend. His very text would be a blow upon the heart; the eyes filled from the beginning. People would often say that they were "sorry for the family," sitting through Dr Drummond's celebration of their bereavement; and the sympathy was probably well founded. But how fine he was when he paid the last tribute to that upright man, his elder and office-bearer, David Davidson! How his words marched, sorrowing to the close! "Much I have said of him, and more than he would have had me say." Will it not stay with those who heard it till the very end, the trenchant, mournful fall of that "more than he would have had me say"?

It was a thing that Hugh Finlay could not abide in Dr Drummond.

As the winter passed, the little Doctor was hard put to it to keep his hands off the great political issue of the year, bound up as it was in the tenets of his own politics, which he held only less uncompromisingly than those of the Shorter Catechism. It was, unfortunately for him, a gradual and peaceful progress of opinion, marked by no dramatic incidents; and analogy was hard to find in either Testament for a change of fiscal policy based on imperial advantage. Dr Drummond liked a pretty definite parallel; he had small opinion of the practice of drawing a pint out of a thimble, as he considered Finlay must have done when he preached the gospel of imperialism from Deuteronomy XXX, 14. "But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it." Moreover, to preach politics in Knox Church was a liberty in Finlay.

The fact that Finlay had been beforehand with him operated perhaps to reconcile the Doctor to his difficulty; and the candidature of one of his own members in what was practically the imperial interest no doubt increased his embarrassment. Nevertheless, he would not lose sight of the matter for more than two or three weeks together. Many an odd blow he delivered for its furtherance by way of illustrating higher things, and he kept it always, so to speak, in the practical politics of the long prayer.

It was Sunday evening, and Abby and her husband, as usual, had come to tea. The family was complete with the exception of Lorne, who had driven out to Clayfield with Horace Williams, to talk over some urgent matters with persons whom he would meet at supper at the Metropole Hotel at Clayfield. It was a thing Mrs Murchison thought little short of scandalous—supper to talk business on the Sabbath day, and in a hotel, a place of which the smell about the door was enough to knock you down, even on a weekday. Mrs Murchison considered, and did not scruple to say so, that politics should be left alone on Sundays. Clayfield votes might be very important, but there were such things as commandments, she supposed. "It'll bring no blessing," she declared severely, eyeing Lorne's empty place.

The talk about the lamplit table was, nevertheless, all of the election, blessed or unblessed. It was not in human nature that it shouldn't be, as Mrs Murchison would have very quickly told you if you had found her inconsistent. There was reason in all things, as she frequently said.

"I hear," Alec had told them, "that Octavius Milburn is going around bragging he's got the Elgin Chamber of Commerce consolidated this time."

"Against us?" exclaimed Stella; and her brother said, "Of course!"

"Those Milburns," remarked Mrs Murchison, "are enough to make one's blood boil. I met Mrs Milburn in the market yesterday; she'd been pricing Mrs Crow's ducks, and they were just five cents too dear for her, and she stopped—wonderful thing for her—and had SUCH an amount to say about Lorne, and the honour it was, and the dear only knows what! Butter wouldn't melt in her mouth—and Octavius Milburn doing all he knew against him the whole time! That's the Milburns! I cut her remarkably short," Mrs Murchison added, with satisfaction, "and when she'd made up her mind she'd have to give that extra five cents for the ducks because there weren't any others to be had, she went back and found I'd bought them."

"Well done, Mother!" said Alec, and Oliver remarked that if those were today's ducks they were too good for the Milburn crowd, a lot.

"I expect she wanted them, too," remarked Stella. "They've got the only Mr Hesketh staying with them now. Miss Filkin's in a great state of excitement."

"I guess we can spare them Hesketh," said John Murchison.

"He's a lobster," said Stella with fervour.

"He seems to bring a frost where he goes," continued Abby's husband, "in politics, anyhow. I hear Lorne wants to make a present of him to the other side, for use wherever they'll let him speak longest. Is it true he began his speech out at Jordanville—'Gentlemen—and those of you who are not gentlemen'?"

"Could he have meant Mrs Farquharson and Miss Milburn?" asked Mr Murchison quietly, when the derision subsided; and they laughed again.

"He told me," said Advena, "that he proposed to convert Mr Milburn to the imperial policy."

"He'll have his job cut out for him," said her father.

"For my part," Abby told them, "I think the Milburns are beneath contempt. You don't know exactly what it is, but there's something ABOUT them—not that we ever come in contact with them," she continued with dignity. "I believe they used to be patients of Dr Henry's till he got up in years, but they don't call in Harry."

"Maybe that's what there is about them," said Mr Murchison, innocently.

"Father's made up his mind," announced Dr Harry, and they waited, breathless. There could be only one point upon which Dr Henry could be dubitating at that moment.

"He's going to vote for Lorne."

"He's a lovely old darling!" cried Stella. "Good for Dr Henry Johnson! I knew he would."

The rest were silent with independence and gratification. Dr Henry's Conservatism had been supposed to be invincible. Dr Harry they thought a fair prey to Murchison influence, and he had capitulated early, but he had never promised to answer for his father.

"Yes, he's taken his time about it, and he's consulted about all the known authorities," said his son, humorously. "Went right back to the Manchester school to begin with—sat out on the verandah reading Cobden and Bright the whole summer; if anybody came for advice sent 'em in to me. I did a trade, I tell you! He thought they talked an awful lot of sense, those fellows—from the English point of view. 'D'ye mean to tell me,' he'd say, 'that a generation born and bred in political doctrine of that sort is going to hold on to the colonies at a sacrifice? They'd rather let 'em go at a sacrifice!' Well, then he got to reading the other side of the question, and old Ormiston lent him Parkin, and he lent old Ormiston Goldwin Smith, and then he subscribed to the Times for six months—the bill must have nearly bust him; and then the squire went over without waiting for him and without any assistance from the Times either; and finally—well, he says that if it's good enough business for the people of England it's good enough business for him. Only he keeps on worrying about the people of England, and whether they'll make enough by it to keep them contented, till he can't next month all right, he wants it to be distinctly understood that family connection has nothing to do with it."

"Of course it hasn't," Advena said.

"But we're just as much obliged," remarked Stella.

"A lot of our church people are going to stay at home election day," declared Abby; "they won't vote for Lorne, and they won't vote against imperialism, so they'll just sulk. Silly, I call it."

"Good enough business for us," said Alec.

"Well, what I want to know is," said Mrs Murchison, "whether you are coming to the church you were born and brought up in, Abby, or not, tonight? There's the first bell."

"I'm not going to any church." said Abby. "I went this morning. I'm going home to my baby."

"Your father and mother," said Mrs Murchison, "can go twice a day, and be none the worse for it. By the way, Father, did you know old Mrs Parr was dead? Died this morning at four o'clock. They telephoned for Dr Drummond, and I think they had little to do, for he had been up with her half the night already, Mrs Forsyth told me."

"Did he go?" asked Mr Murchison.

"He did not, for the very good reason that he knew nothing about it. Mrs Forsyth answered the telephone, and told them he hadn't been two hours in his bed, and she wouldn't get him out again for an unconscious deathbed, and him with bronchitis on him and two sermons to preach today."

"I'll warrant Mrs Forsyth caught it in the morning," said John Murchison.

"That she did. The doctor was as cross as two sticks that she hadn't had him out to answer the phone. 'I just spoke up,' she said, 'and told him I didn't see how he was going to do any good to the pour soul over a telephone wire.' 'It isn't that,' he said, 'but I might have put them on to Peter Fratch for the funeral. We've never had an undertaker in the church before,' he said; 'he's just come, and he ought to be supported. Now I expect it's too late, they'll have gone to Liscombe.' He rang them up right away, but they had."

"Dr Drummond can't stand Liscombe," said Alec, as they all laughed a little at the Doctor's foible, all except Advena, who laughed a great deal. She laughed wildly, then weakly. "I wouldn't—think it a pleasure—to be buried by Liscombe myself!" she cried hysterically, and then laughed again until the tears ran down her face, and she lay back in her chair and moaned, still laughing.

Mr and Mrs Murchison, Alec, Stella, and Advena made up the family party; Oliver, for reasons of his own, would attend the River Avenue Methodist Church that evening. They slipped out presently into a crisp white winter night. The snow was banked on both sides of the street. Spreading garden fir trees huddled together weighted down with it; ragged icicles hung from the eaves or lay in long broken fingers on the trodden paths. The snow snapped and tore under their feet; there was a glorious moon that observed every tattered weed sticking up through the whiteness, and etched it with its shadow. The town lay under the moon almost dramatic, almost mysterious, so withdrawn it was out of the cold, so turned in upon its own soul of the fireplace. It might have stood, in the snow and the silence, for a shell and a symbol of the humanity within, for angels or other strangers to mark with curiosity. Mr and Mrs Murchison were neither angels nor strangers; they looked at it and saw that the Peterson place was still standing empty, and that old Mr Fisher hadn't finished his new porch before zero weather came to stop him.

The young people were well ahead; Mrs Murchison, on her husband's arm, stepped along with the spring of an impetus undisclosed.

"Is it to be the Doctor tonight?" asked John Murchison. "He was so hoarse this morning I wouldn't be surprised to see Finlay in the pulpit. They're getting only morning services in East Elgin just now, while they're changing the lighting arrangements."

"Are they, indeed? Well, I hope they'll change them and be done with it, for I can't say I'm anxious for too much of their Mr Finlay in Knox Church."

"Oh, you like the man well enough for a change, Mother!" John assured her.

"I've nothing to say against his preaching. It's the fellow himself. And I hope we won't get him tonight for, the way I feel now, if I see him gawking up the pulpit steps it'll be as much as I can do to keep in my seat, and so I just tell you, John."

"You're a little out of patience with him, I see," said Mr Murchison.

"And it would be a good thing if more than me were out of patience with him. There's such a thing as too much patience, I've noticed."

"I dare say," replied her husband, cheerfully.

"If Advena were any daughter of mine she'd have less patience with him."

"She's not much like you," assented the father.

"I must say I like a girl to have a little spirit if a man has none. And before I'd have him coming to the house week after week the way he has, I'd see him far enough."

"He might as well come there as anywhere," Mr Murchison replied, ambiguously. "I suppose he has now and then time on his hands?"

"Well, he won't have it on his hands much longer."

"He won't, eh?"

"No, he won't," Mrs Murchison almost shook the arm she was attached to. "John, I think you might show a little interest! The man's going to be married."

"You don't say that?" John Murchison's tone expressed not only astonishment but concern. Mrs Murchison was almost mollified.

"But I do say it. His future wife is coming here to Elgin next month, she and her aunt, or her grandmother, or somebody, and they're to stay at Dr Drummond's and be married as soon as possible."

"Nonsense," said Mr Murchison, which was his way of expressing simple astonishment.

"There's no nonsense about it. Advena told me herself this afternoon."

"Did she seem put out about it?"

"She's not a girl to show it," Mrs Murchison hedged, "if she was. I just looked at her. 'Well,' I said, 'that's a piece of news. When did you hear it?' I said. 'Oh, I've known it all the winter!' says my lady. What I wanted to say was that for an engaged man he had been pretty liberal with his visits, but she had such a queer look in her eyes I couldn't express myself, somehow."

"It was just as well left unsaid," her husband told her, thoughtfully.

"I'm not so sure," Mrs Murchison retorted. "You're a great man, John, for letting everything alone. When he's been coming here regularly for more than a year, putting ideas into the girl's head—"

"He seems to have told her how things were."

"That's all very well—if he had kept himself to himself at the same time."

"Well, Mother, you know you never thought much of the prospect."

"No, I didn't," Mrs Murchison said. "It wouldn't be me that would be married to him, and I've always said so. But I'd got more or less used to it," she confessed. "The man's well enough in some ways. Dear knows there would be a pair of them—one's as much of a muddler as the other! And anybody can see with half an eye that Advena likes him. It hasn't turned out as I expected, that's a fact, John, and I'm just very much annoyed."

"I'm not best pleased about it myself," said John Murchison, expressing, as usual, a very small proportion of the regret that he felt, "but I suppose they know their own business."