ter a hurried breakfast and
an innocuous glance at the damp morning papers, we started to the
money-lender's, with Jennings to lend his name. We were in Chippenden
close upon the hour my father had named, bringing to the startled
electors the first news of their member's death.

During the heat of the canvass for votes I received a kind letter from
the squire in reply to one of mine, wherein he congratulated me on my
prospects of success, and wound up: 'Glad to see it announced you are
off with that princess of yours. Show them we are as proud as they are,
Harry, and a fig for the whole foreign lot! Come to Riversley soon, and
be happy.' What did that mean? Heriot likewise said in a letter: 'So
it's over? The proud prince kicks? You will not thank me for telling you
now what you know I think about it.' I appealed to my father. 'Canvass!
canvass!' cried he; and he persistently baffled me. It was from Temple
I learnt that on the day of our starting for Chippenden, the newspapers
contained a paragraph in large print flatly denying upon authority that
there was any foundation for the report of an intended marriage between
the Princess of Eppenwelzen-Sarkeld and an English gentleman. Then
I remembered how that morning my father had flung the papers down,
complaining of their dampness.

Would such denial have appeared without Ottilia's sanction?

My father proved that I was harnessed to him; there was no stopping, no
time for grieving. Pace was his specific. He dragged me the round of
the voters; he gave dinners at the inn of true Liberals, and ate of them
contentedly; he delivered speeches incessantly. The whole force of his.
serio-comic genius was alive in its element at Chippenden. From balls
and dinners, and a sharp contest to maintain his position in town, he
was down among us by the first morning train, bright as Apollo, and
quite the sun of the place, dazzling the independent electors and their
wives, and even me somewhat; amazing me, certainly. Dettermain, his
lawyer, who had never seen him in action, and supposed he would treat
an election as he did his Case, with fits and starts of energy, was not
less astonished, and tried to curb him.

'Mr. Dettermain, my dear sir, I apprehend it is the electoral maxim
to woo the widowed borough with the tear in its eye, and I shall do so
hotly, in a right masculine manner,' my father said. 'We have the
start; and if we beat the enemy by nothing else we will beat him by
consti