e nation. Money had given
him nothing, nothing but the mere feeling of brute power: with his
three hundred thousand pounds he had felt himself to be no more
palpably near to the goal of his ambition than when he had chipped
stones for three shillings and sixpence a day. But when he was led up
and introduced at that table, when he shook the old premier's hand
on the floor of the House of Commons, when he heard the honourable
member for Barchester alluded to in grave debate as the greatest
living authority on railway matters, then, indeed, he felt that he
had achieved something.

And now this cup was ravished from his lips, almost before it was
tasted. When he was first told as a certainty that the decision of
the committee was against him, he bore up against the misfortune like
a man. He laughed heartily, and declared himself well rid of a very
profitless profession; cut some little joke about Mr Moffat and his
thrashing, and left on those around him an impression that he was
a man so constituted, so strong in his own resolves, so steadily
pursuant of his own work, that no little contentions of this kind
could affect him. Men admired his easy laughter, as, shuffling his
half-crowns with both his hands in his trouser-pockets, he declared
that Messrs Romer and Reddypalm were the best friends he had known
for this many a day.

But not the less did he walk out from the room in which he was
standing a broken-hearted man. Hope could not buoy him up as she may
do other ex-members in similarly disagreeable circumstances. He could
not afford to look forward to what further favours parliamentary
future might have in store for him after a lapse of five or six
years. Five or six years! Why, his life was not worth four years'
purchase; of that he was perfectly aware: he could not now live
without the stimulus of brandy; and yet, while he took it, he knew he
was killing himself. Death he did not fear; but he would fain have
wished, after his life of labour, to have lived, while yet he could
live, in the blaze of that high world to which for a moment he had
attained.

He laughed loud and cheerily as he left his parliamentary friends,
and, putting himself into the train, went down to Boxall Hill. He
laughed loud and cheerily; but he never laughed again. It had not
been his habit to laugh much at Boxall Hill. It was there he kept his
wife, and Mr Winterbones, and the brandy bottle behind his pillow. He
had not often there found it n