s Gladstone will take
the Exchequer." "What! serve under Hartington? You don't know the
old gentleman's pride if you expect that;" and so on and so forth,
a chorus of excited and bewildering exclamations. Amid all the
hurly-burly, one figure in the throng seemed quite unmoved, and
its immobility attracted the notice of the throng. "Well, really,
Vaughan, I should have thought that even you would have felt excited
about this. I know you don't care much about politics in a general
way, but this is something out of the common. The Duke of Buccleuch
beaten on his own ground, and Gladstone heading straight for the
Premiership! Isn't that enough to quicken your pulse?"

But the man whom they saluted as Vaughan still looked undisturbed.
"Well, I don't think I ever was quite as much in love with Dizzy
as you were; and as to the Premiership, we are not quite at the
end yet, and _Alors comme alors_."

Philip Vaughan was a man just over fifty: tall, pale,
distinguished-looking, with something in his figure and bearing
that reminded one of the statue of Sidney Herbert, which in 1880
still stood before the War Office in Pall Mall. He looked both
delicate and melancholy. His face was curiously devoid of animation;
but his most marked characteristic was an habitual look of meditative
abstraction from the things which immediately surrounded him. As
he walked down the steps of the club towards a brougham which was
waiting for him, the man who had tried in vain to interest him
in the Midlothian Election turned to his nearest neighbour, and
said: "Vaughan is really the most extraordinary fellow I know.
There is nothing on earth that interests him in the faintest degree.
Politics, books, sport, society, foreign affairs--he I never seems
to care a rap about any of them; and yet he knows something about
them all, and, if only you can get him to talk, he can talk extremely
well. It is particularly curious about politics, for generally, if
a man has once been in political life, he feels the fascination
of it to the end." "But was Vaughan ever in political life?" "Oh
yes I suppose you are too young to remember. He got into Parliament
just after he left Oxford. He was put in by an old uncle for a Family
Borough--Bilton--one of those snug little seats, not exactly 'Pocket
Boroughs,' but very like them, which survived until the Reform Act
of 1867." "How long did he sit?" "Only for one Parliament--from
1852 to 1857. No one ever knew why he gave