necessary for communicating with Lady Agnes.

She had remained at the house, not going to the Wheatsheaf, the Liberal
inn, with the others; preferring to await in privacy and indeed in
solitude the momentous result of the poll. She had come down to Harsh
with the two girls in the course of the proceedings. Julia hadn't
thought they would do much good, but she was expansive and indulgent now
and had generously asked them. Lady Agnes had not a nice canvassing
manner, effective as she might have been in the character of the high,
benignant, affable mother--looking sweet participation but not
interfering--of the young and handsome, the shining, convincing,
wonderfully clever and certainly irresistible aspirant. Grace Dormer had
zeal without art, and Lady Agnes, who during her husband's lifetime had
seen their affairs follow the satisfactory principle of a tendency to
defer to supreme merit, had never really learned the lesson that voting
goes by favour. However, she could pray God if, she couldn't make love
to the cheesemonger, and Nick felt she had stayed at home to pray for
him. I must add that Julia Dallow was too happy now, flicking her whip
in the bright summer air, to say anything so ungracious even to herself
as that her companion had been returned in spite of his nearest female
relatives. Besides, Biddy _had_ been a rosy help: she had looked
persuasively pretty, in white and blue, on platforms and in recurrent
carriages, out of which she had tossed, blushing and making people feel
they would remember her eyes, several words that were telling for their
very simplicity.

Mrs. Dallow was really too glad for any definite reflexion, even for
personal exultation, the vanity of recognising her own large share of
the work. Nick was in and was now beside her, tired, silent, vague,
beflowered and beribboned, and he had been splendid from beginning to
end, beautifully good-humoured and at the same time beautifully
clever--still cleverer than she had supposed he could be. The sense of
her having quickened his cleverness and been repaid by it or by his
gratitude--it came to the same thing--in a way she appreciated was not
assertive and jealous: it was lost for the present in the general happy
break of the long tension. So nothing passed between them in their
progress to the house; there was no sound in the park but the pleasant
rustle of summer--it seemed an applausive murmur--and the swift roll of
the vehicle.

Lady Agnes