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The poor girl was in despair She had fancied him a man of power and ambition, a doer, a man of action But he was no racefulappearance The despised Mr Stocks was the real worker She had laughed at his incessant soleht-heartedness as the true air of the great But she had been ht-hearted was the half-hearted, "the wandering dilettante," Mr Stocks had called him, "the worst type of the pseudo-culture of our universities" She told herself she hated the whole affectation of breeding and chivalry Those men--Lewis and his friends--were always kind and soft-spoken to her and her sex Her soul hated it; she cried aloud for equal treatour of life Their manners were a mere cloak for contempt If they could only be rude to a woman, it would be a welcome relief from this facile condescension What had she or any woalley? They despised her kind, with the scorn of sultans who chose their wo, and a bitterness filled her heart against the whole clique of easy aristocrats Mr Stocks was her true ally To hi child, a delicate toy

So far she went in her heresy, but no farther It is a true saying that you will find twenty heroic woenerous one; but Alice was not wholly without this rarest of qualities The rey eyes, and a robust cheerfulness brought back so Lewis The probleirl, torn between co with painful clearness the coe in secret tears

III

The honours of the contest, so far as Lewis's party was concerned, fell to George Winterhaed reluctantly into the thing, foreseeing dire disaster for himself, for he knew little and cared less about h at a pinch to place his ignorance at his friend's disposal So he had been set to the dreary work of co, dispatched as aide-de-camp to any chance orator who enlivened the county But at last a crisis arrived in which other use was made of him A speaker of soht at the considerable village of Allerfoot The great man failed, and as it was the very eve of the election none could be found for his place Leas in despair, till he thought of George It was a desperate chance, but the necessity was urgent, so, shutting himself up for an hour, he wrote the better part of a speech which he entrusted to his friend to prepare George, having a goodthe friendly paper and whole-heartedly abusing his chief, he set out grimly to his fate