es bringing voters of both parties
to the polls. Paul, driving in his gaily-decked car about the
constituency, shared all these demonstrations and heard these rumours.
The latter he denied and caused to be denied, as far as lay in his
power. In the broad High Street, thronged with folk, and dissonant with
tram cars and motor 'buses, he came upon a quarrelsome crowd looking up
at a window above a poulterer's shop, from which hung something white,
like a strip of wall paper.

Approaching, he perceived that it bore a crude drawing of a convict and
"Good old Dartmoor" for legend. White with anger, he stopped the car,
leaped out on to the curb, and pushing his way through the crowd,
entered the shop. He seized one of the white-coated assistants by the
arm. "Show me the way to that first-floor room," he cried fiercely.

The assistant, half-dragged, half-leading, and wholly astonished, took
him through the shop and pointed to the staircase. Paul sprang up and
dashed through the door into the room, which appeared to be some
business office. Three or four young men, who turned grinning from the
window, be thrust aside, and plucking the offending strip from the
drawing-pins which secured it to the sill, he tore it across and across.

"You cads! You brutes!" he shouted, trampling on the fragments. "Can't
you fight like Englishmen?"

The young men, realizing the identity of the wrathful apparition,
stared open-mouthed, turned red, and said nothing. Paul strode out,
looking very fierce, and drove off in his car amid the cheers of the
crowd, to which he paid no notice.

"It makes me sick!" he cried passionately to Wilson, who was with him.
"I hope to God he wins in spite, of it!"

"What about the party?" asked Wilson.

Paul damned the party. He was in the overwrought mood in which a man
damns everything. Quagmire and bramble and the derision of Olympus-that
was the end of his vanity of an existence. Suppose he was elected--what
then? He would be a failure-the high gods in their mirth would see to
that--a puppet in Frank Ayres' hands until the next general election,
when he would have ignominiously to retire. Awakener of England indeed!
He could not even awaken Hickney Heath. As he dashed through the
streets in his triumphal car, he hated Hickney Heath, hated the wild
"hoorays" of waggon-loads of his supporters on their way to the polls,
hated the smug smiles of his committee-men at polling stations. He
forgot that he did not