eaders began to be a little anxious about a possible loss of
wheat-growing votes. It was, as John Murchison said, a queer position
for everybody concerned; queer enough, no doubt, to admit a Tory journal
into the house on sufferance and as a special matter; but he had a
disapproving look for it as it lay on the hall floor, and seldom was the
first to open it.

Nevertheless Lorne found more satisfaction in talking imperialism with
his father than with anyone else. While the practical half of John
Murchison was characteristically alive to the difficulties involved,
the sentimental half of him was ready at any time to give out cautious
sparks of sympathy with the splendour of Wallingham's scheme; and he
liked the feeling that a son of his should hark back in his allegiance
to the old land. There was a kind of chivalry in the placing of certain
forms of beauty--political honour and public devotion, which blossomed
best, it seemed, over there--above the material ease and margin of the
new country, and even above the grand chance it offered for a man to
make his mark. Mr Murchison was susceptible to this in anyone, and
responsive to it in his son.

As to the local party leaders, they had little more than a shrug for the
subject. So far as they were concerned, there was no Empire and no Idea;
Wallingham might as well not have been born. It seemed to Lorne that
they maintained toward him personally a special reticence about it.
Reticence indeed characterized their behaviour generally during the
period between the abandonment of the suits and the arrangement of the
second Liberal convention. They had little advice for him about his
political attitude, little advice about anything. He noticed that his
presence on one or two occasions seemed to embarrass them, and that his
arrival would sometimes have a disintegrating effect upon a group in the
post-office or at a street corner. He added it, without thinking, to his
general heaviness; they held it a good deal against him, he supposed, to
have reduced their proud standing majority to a beggarly two figures; he
didn't blame them.

I cannot think that the sum of these depressions alone would have
been enough to overshadow so buoyant a soul as Lorne Murchison's.
The characteristics of him I have tried to convey were grafted on an
excellent fund of common sense. He was well aware of the proportions of
things; he had no despair of the Idea, nor would he despair should the
Idea ethere