the kerb where the car with its weary chauffeur was
waiting. The night had cleared and the stars shone bright in the sky.
She pointed to one, haphazard. "Your star, Paul. Believe in it still."

He drove off. She entered the house, and, flinging herself on the floor
by Barney Bill, buried her head on the old man's knees and sobbed her
brave heart out.

CHAPTER XXII

THE next morning amazement fluttered over a million breakfast tables
and throbbed in a million railway carriages. For all the fierceness of
political passions, parliamentary elections are but sombre occurrences
to the general public. Rarely are they attended by the picturesque, the
dramatic, the tragic. But already the dramatic had touched the election
of Hickney Heath, stimulating interest in the result. Thousands,
usually apathetic as to political matters, opened their newspapers to
see how the ex-convict candidate had fared. They read, with a gasp,
that he was dead; that his successful opponent had proclaimed himself
to be his son. They had the dramatic value of cumulative effect. If
Paul had ever sought notoriety he had it now. His name rang through the
length and breadth of the land. The early editions of the London
afternoon papers swelled the chorus of amazed comment and conjecture.
Some had even routed out a fact or two, Heaven knows whence, concerning
father and son. According to party they meted out praise or blame.
Some, unversed in the law, declared the election invalid. The point was
discussed in a hundred clubs.

There was consternation in the social world. The Duchesses' boudoirs
with which Paul had been taunted hummed with indignation. They had
entertained an adventurer unawares. They had entrusted the sacred ark
of their political hopes to a charlatan. Their daughters had danced
with the offspring of gaol and gutter. He must be cast out from the
midst of them. So did those that were foolish furiously rage together
and imagine many a vain thing. The Winwoods came in for pity. They had
been villainously imposed upon. And the Young England League to which
they had all subscribed so handsomely--where were its funds? Was it
safe to leave them at the disposal of so unprincipled a fellow? Then
germs of stories crept in from the studios and the stage and grew
perversely in the overheated atmosphere. Paul's reputation began to
assume a pretty colour. On the other hand, there were those who, while
deploring the deception, were impressed by the