r
kindles pitchy blackness with its legions at one movement. Verily it was
the ghost of Mrs. Burman come to the bed, between them.

Meanwhile the sun of Victor Radnor's popularity was already up over the
extended circle likely to be drenched by a falsification of his daring
augury, though the scud flew swift, and the beeches raved, and the oaks
roared and snarled, and pine-trees fell their lengths. Fine tomorrow, to
a certainty! he had been heard to say. The doubt weighed for something;
the balance inclined with the gentleman who had become so popular: for he
had done the trick so suddenly, like a stroke of the wizard; and was a
real man, not one of your spangled zodiacs selling for sixpence and
hopping to a lucky hit, laughed at nine times out of ten. The reasoning
went--and it somewhat affected the mansion as well as the cottage,--that
if he had become popular in this astonishing fashion, after making one of
the biggest fortunes of modern times, he might, he must, have secret
gifts. 'You can't foretell weather!' cried a pothouse sceptic. But the
workmen at Lakelands declared that he had foretold it. Sceptics among the
common folk were quaintly silenced by other tales of him, being a whiff
from the delirium attending any mention of his name.

How had he become suddenly so popular as to rouse in the mind of Mr.
Caddis, the sitting Member for the division of the county (said to have
the seat in his pocket), a particular inquisitiveness to know the bearing
of his politics? Mr. Radnor was rich, true: but these are days when
wealthy men, ambitious of notoriety, do not always prove faithful to
their class; some of them are cunning to bid for the suffrages of the
irresponsible, recklessly enfranchised, corruptible masses. Mr. Caddis,
if he had the seat in his pocket, had it from the support of a class
trusting him to support its interests: he could count on the landowners,
on the clergy, on the retired or retiring or comfortably cushioned
merchants resident about Wrensham, on the many obsequious among electoral
shopmen; annually he threw open his grounds, and he subscribed,
patronized, did what was expected; and he was not popular; he was
unpopular. Why? But why was the sun of this 23rd August, shining from its
rise royally upon pacified, enrolled and liveried armies of cloud, more
agreeable to earth's populations than his pinched appearance of the poor
mopped red nose and melancholic rheumy eyelets on a January day!
Undoubt