consult him immediately; and then, if he be
engaged, I dare say he will manage to come all the same.'

Accordingly, about half-past eight o'clock, the two peers arrived at
Bellamont House together. They were unexpectedly late; they had been
detained at the House. The duke was excited; even Lord Esk-dale looked
as if something had happened. Something had happened; there had been a
division in the House of Lords. Rare and startling event! It seemed
as if the peers were about to resume their functions. Divisions in
the House of Lords are now-a-days so thinly scattered, that, when one
occurs, the peers cackle as if they had laid an egg. They are quite
proud of the proof of their still procreative powers. The division
to-night had not been on a subject of any public interest or importance;
but still it was a division, and, what was more, the Government had been
left in a minority. True, the catastrophe was occasioned by a mistake.
The dictator had been asleep during the debate, woke suddenly from a
dyspeptic dream, would make a speech, and spoke on the wrong side.
A lively colleague, not yet sufficiently broken in to the frigid
discipline of the High Court of Registry, had pulled the great man once
by his coat-tails, a House of Commons practice, permitted to the Cabinet
when their chief is blundering, very necessary sometimes for a lively
leader, but of which Sir Robert highly disapproves, as the arrangement
of his coat-tails, next to beating the red box, forms the most important
part of his rhetorical accessories. The dictator, when he at length
comprehended that he had made a mistake, persisted in adhering to it;
the division was called, some of the officials escaped, the rest were
obliged to vote with their ruthless master; but his other friends, glad
of an opportunity of asserting their independence and administering to
the dictator a slight check in a quiet inoffensive way, put him in a
minority; and the Duke of Bellamont and Lord Eskdale had contributed to
this catastrophe.

Dinner was served in the library; the conversation during it was chiefly
the event of the morning. The duchess, who, though not a partisan, was
something of a politician, thought it was a pity that the dictator had
ever stepped out of his military sphere; her husband, who had never
before seen a man's coat-tails pulled when he was speaking, dilated much
upon the singular circumstance of Lord Spur so disporting himself on the
present occasion; whil