aid he, "to remain
so long with my poor wife."

"We had a great many things to talk about, after you went."

"It is very kind of you, for she does not often see a friend,
nowadays. Will you have the goodness to tell Mr. Robarts that I shall
be here at the school, at eleven o'clock to-morrow?" And then he
bowed, taking off his hat to them, and they drove on.

"If he really does care about her comfort, I shall not think so badly
of him," said Lucy.

CHAPTER XXIII

The Triumph of the Giants

And now about the end of April news arrived almost simultaneously
in all quarters of the habitable globe that was terrible in its
import to one of the chief persons of our history;--some may think
to the chief person in it. All high parliamentary people will
doubtless so think, and the wives and daughters of such. The Titans
warring against the gods had been for awhile successful. Typhoeus
and Mimas, Porphyrion and Rhoecus, the giant brood of old,
steeped in ignorance and wedded to corruption, had scaled the
heights of Olympus, assisted by that audacious flinger of deadly
ponderous missiles, who stands ever ready armed with his terrific
sling--Supplehouse, the Enceladus of the press. And in this universal
cataclasm of the starry councils, what could a poor Diana do, Diana
of the Petty Bag, but abandon her pride of place to some rude Orion?
In other words, the ministry had been compelled to resign, and with
them Mr. Harold Smith. "And so poor Harold is out, before he has well
tasted the sweets of office," said Sowerby, writing to his friend the
parson; "and as far as I know, the only piece of Church patronage
which has fallen in the way of the ministry since he joined it, has
made its way down to Framley--to my great joy and contentment." But
it hardly tended to Mark's joy and contentment on the same subject
that he should be so often reminded of the benefit conferred upon
him.

Terrible was this break-down of the ministry, and especially to
Harold Smith, who to the last had had confidence in that theory of
new blood. He could hardly believe that a large majority of the House
should vote against a Government which he had only just joined. "If
we are to go on in this way," he said to his young friend Green
Walker, "the Queen's Government cannot be carried on." That alleged
difficulty as to carrying on the Queen's Government has been
frequently mooted in late years since a certain great man first
introduced the idea. Ne