was in the same
helpless state of mind and body as before,--neither worse nor better;
but waking up at intervals with vivid gleams of interest in the election
at the wave of a blue banner, at the cry of "Blue forever!" It was the
old broken-clown charger, who, dozing in the meadows, starts at the roll
of the drum. No persuasions Dick could employ would induce his father to
promise to vote even one Yellow. You might as well have expected the
old Roman, with his monomaniac cry against Carthage, to have voted for
choosing Carthaginians for consuls. But poor John, nevertheless, was
not only very civil, but very humble to Dick,--"very happy to oblige the
gentleman."

"Your own son!" bawled Dick; "and here is your own grandson."

"Very happy to serve you both; but you see you are the wrong colour."

Then as he gazed at Leonard, the old man approached him with trembling
knees, stroked his hair, looked into his face, piteously. "Be thee my
grandson?" he faltered. "Wife, wife, Nora had no son, had she? My memory
begins to fail me, sir; pray excuse it; but you have a look about the
eyes that--" Old John began to weep, and his wife led him away.

"Don't come again," she said to Leonard, harshly, when she returned.
"He'll not sleep all night now." And then, observing that the tears
stood in Leonard's eyes, she added, in softened tones, "I am glad to see
you well and thriving, and to hear that you have been of great service
to my son Richard, who is a credit and an honour to the family, though
poor John cannot vote for him or for you against his conscience; and he
should not be asked," she added, firing up; "and it is a sin to ask it,
and he so old, and no one to defend him but me. But defend him I will
while I have life!"

The poet recognized woman's brave, loving, wife-like heart here, and
would have embraced the stern grandmother, if she had not drawn back
from him; and, as she turned towards the room to which she had led her
husband, she said over her shoulder,--

"I'm not so unkind as I seem, boy; but it is better for you, and for
all, that you should not come to this house again,--better that you had
not come into the town."

"Fie, Mother!" said Dick, seeing that Leonard, bending his head,
silently walked from the room. "You should be prouder of your grandson
than you are of me."

"Prouder of him who may shame us all yet?"

"What do you mean?"

But Mrs. Avenel shook her head and vanished.

"Never mind her, poor