as to treat them
like junior comrades, had raised the vow within himself on seeing her:
You, or no woman!

The colonel delighted in him, both as a strong and able young fellow,
and a refreshingly aggressive recruit of his party, who was for
onslaught, and invoked common sense, instead of waving the flag of
sentiment in retreat; a very horse-artillery man of Tories. Regretting
immensely that Mr. Tuckham had not reached England earlier, that he
might have occupied the seat for Bevisham, about to be given to Captain
Baskelett, Colonel Halkett set up a contrast of Blackburn Tuckham
and Nevil Beauchamp; a singular instance of unfairness, his daughter
thought, considering that the distinct contrast presented by the
circumstances was that of Mr. Tuckham and Captain Baskelett.

'It seems to me, papa,--that you are contrasting the idealist and the
realist,' she said.

'Ah, well, we don't want the idealist in politics,' muttered the
colonel.

Latterly he also had taken to shaking his head over Nevil: Cecilia dared
not ask him why.

Mr. Tuckham arrived at Mount Laurels on the eve of the Nomination day
in Bevisham. An article in the Bevisham Gazette calling upon all true
Liberals to demonstrate their unanimity by a multitudinous show of
hands, he ascribed to the writing of a child of Erin; and he was highly
diverted by the Liberal's hiring of Paddy to 'pen and spout' for him. 'A
Scotchman manages, and Paddy does the sermon for all their journals,' he
said off-hand; adding: 'And the English are the compositors, I suppose.'
You may take that for an instance of the national spirit of Liberal
newspapers!

'Ah!' sighed the colonel, as at a case clearly demonstrated against
them.

A drive down to Bevisham to witness the ceremony of the nomination in
the town-hall sobered Mr. Tuckham's disposition to generalize. Beauchamp
had the show of hands, and to say with Captain Baskelett, that they were
a dirty majority, was beneath Mr. Tuckham's verbal antagonism. He fell
into a studious reserve, noting everything, listening to everybody,
greatly to Colonel Halkett's admiration of one by nature a talker and a
thunderer.

The show of hands Mr. Seymour Austin declared to be the most delusive of
electoral auspices; and it proved so. A little later than four o'clock
in the afternoon of the election-day, Cecilia received a message from
her father telling her that both of the Liberals were headed; 'Beauchamp
nowhere.'

Mrs. Grancey Lespel