nd
that 'll detain me here, and you might join us and lend him an ear for
an evening.'

'I have particular reasons for going to Lespel's; I hear he wavers
toward a Tory conspiracy of some sort,' said Beauchamp.

The colonel held his tongue.

The untiring young candidate chose to walk down to Bevisham at eleven
o'clock at night, that he might be the readier to continue his canvass
of the borough on Monday morning early. He was offered a bed or a
conveyance, and he declined both; the dog-cart he declined out of
consideration for horse and groom, which an owner of stables could not
but approve.

Colonel Halkett broke into exclamations of pity for so good a young
fellow so misguided.

The night was moonless, and Cecilia, looking through the window, said
whimsically, 'He has gone out into the darkness, and is no light in it!'

Certainly none shone. She however carried a lamp that revealed him
footing on with a wonderful air of confidence, and she was rather
surprised to hear her father regret that Nevil Beauchamp should be
losing his good looks already, owing to that miserable business of his
in Bevisham. She would have thought the contrary, that he was looking as
well as ever.

'He dresses just as he used to dress,' she observed.

The individual style of a naval officer of breeding, in which you see
neatness trifling with disorder, or disorder plucking at neatness,
like the breeze a trim vessel, had been caught to perfection by Nevil
Beauchamp, according to Cecilia. It presented him to her mind in a
cheerful and a very undemocratic aspect, but in realizing it, the
thought, like something flashing black, crossed her--how attractive such
a style must be to a Frenchwoman!

'He may look a little worn,' she acquiesced.

CHAPTER XVIII. CONCERNING THE ACT OF CANVASSING

Tories dread the restlessness of Radicals, and Radicals are in awe of
the organization of Tories. Beauchamp thought anxiously of the high
degree of confidence existing in the Tory camp, whose chief could afford
to keep aloof, while he slaved all day and half the night to thump ideas
into heads, like a cooper on a cask:--an impassioned cooper on an empty
cask! if such an image is presentable. Even so enviously sometimes the
writer and the barrister, men dependent on their active wits, regard the
man with a business fixed in an office managed by clerks. That man seems
by comparison celestially seated. But he has his fits of trepidation;
for new t