t in that august assembly which men call the
Cabinet. He could thus afford to put up with the small everyday
calamity of having a wife who loved another man better than she loved
him.

The presence of the Duke of St Bungay at Matching was assumed to be a
sure sign of Mr Palliser's coming triumph. The Duke was a statesman
of a very different class, but he also had been eminently successful
as an aristocratic pillar of the British Constitutional Republic. He
was a minister of very many years' standing, being as used to cabinet
sittings as other men are to their own armchairs; but he had never
been a hard-working man. Though a constant politician, he had ever
taken politics easy whether in office or out. The world had said
before now that the Duke might be Premier, only that he would not
take the trouble. He had been consulted by a very distinguished
person,--so the papers had said more than once,--as to the making of
Prime Ministers. His voice in council was esteemed to be very great.
He was regarded as a strong rock of support to the liberal cause, and
yet nobody ever knew what he did; nor was there much record of what
he said. The offices which he held, or had held, were generally those
to which no very arduous duties were attached. In severe debates he
never took upon himself the brunt of opposition oratory. What he said
in the House was generally short and pleasant,--with some slight,
drolling, undercurrent of uninjurious satire running through it. But
he was a walking miracle of the wisdom of common sense. He never lost
his temper. He never made mistakes. He never grew either hot or cold
in a cause. He was never reckless in politics, and never cowardly. He
snubbed no man, and took snubbings from no man. He was a Knight of
the Garter, a Lord Lieutenant of his county, and at sixty-two had
his digestion unimpaired and his estate in excellent order. He was a
great buyer of pictures, which, perhaps, he did not understand, and a
great collector of books which certainly he never read. All the world
respected him, and he was a man to whom the respect of all the world
was as the breath of his nostrils.

But even he was not without his peacock on the wall, his skeleton
in the closet, his thorn in his side; though the peacock did not
scream loud, the skeleton was not very terrible in his anatomical
arrangement, nor was the thorn likely to fester to a gangrene. The
Duke was always in awe about his wife.

He was ever uneasy a