selves or their wives invited to any
manner of festivity up at the ducal hall. All that the noble family
ever did for the townspeople was to come at certain seasons to Keeton
and allow themselves to be looked at. This was enough for the time. The
illustrious ladies could be seen, and, as has been said, they did
sometimes speak a word to favored and envied persons. They were loved
for being great personages, not for anything they did to win such
devotion. "Love is enough," says the poet.

All these considerations, however, rendered it hard to calculate the
exact chances of opposition in the borough of Keeton. Of course
revolutionary opinions were growing up, old people found, there as well
as elsewhere. There was a new class of Conservatives springing up whom
steady, old-fashioned politicians found it not easy to distinguish from
the Radicals of their younger days. On the other hand, keen-sighted
persons could not fail to perceive that, whereas in their youth almost
all young men had a tendency to be or to fancy themselves Radicals, it
was now growing rather the fashion for immature politicians to boast
themselves Tories, and to talk of a spirited foreign policy and the
dangers of Cosmopolitanism. It would be hard to say how things might
turn out, knowing people thought, as they shook their heads, and hoped
the expected contest might not come on for some time.

Now the contest was at hand. At least the sitting member had positively
declared that he would sit no longer, and it was announced that the
Duke was coming to Keeton, and that Mr. Augustus Sheppard was to be the
Duke's candidate. No more striking proof could be given of the recent
change in the political condition of Keeton than is found in the fact
that the adoption of Mr. Sheppard as a candidate by the ducal family
did not even to the most devoted and sanguine followers of the great
house make Mr. Sheppard's election seem by any means a matter of
absolute certainty. There was a tolerably strong conviction everywhere,
long before any opposition was announced, that the Duke's candidate
would not be allowed to walk over the course and right into the House
of Commons this time. Nobody in the town would oppose the Duke very
likely, but the man to oppose would come.

Now the man actually had come. Victor Heron had issued his address and
was in Keeton. His address was original; he had positively refused from
the first to make any grand professions of superior statesm