sion, Drummond, and Ramsden, and Beeswax, would go out
with him, and the Government would be broken up; but next Session you
may get rid of him safely."

"I wish it were broken up," said the Prime Minister.

"You have your duty to do by the country and by the Queen, and you
mustn't regard your own wishes. Next Session let Monk be ready with
his Bill again,--the same measure exactly. Let Sir Orlando resign
then if he will. Should he do so I doubt whether any one would go
with him. Drummond does not like him much better than you and I do."
The poor Prime Minister was forced to obey. The old Duke was his
only trusted counsellor, and he found himself constrained by his
conscience to do as that counsellor counselled him. When, however,
Sir Orlando, in his place as Leader of the House, in answer to some
question from a hot and disappointed Radical, averred that the whole
of her Majesty's Government had been quite in unison on this question
of the county suffrage, he was hardly able to restrain himself. "If
there be differences of opinion they must be kept in the background,"
said the Duke of St. Bungay. "Nothing can justify a direct
falsehood," said the Duke of Omnium. Thus it came to pass that the
only real measure which the Government had in hand was one by which
Phineas Finn hoped so to increase the power of Irish municipalities
as to make the Home Rulers believe that a certain amount of Home Rule
was being conceded to them. It was not a great measure, and poor
Phineas himself hardly believed in it. And thus the Duke's ministry
came to be called the Faineants.

But the Duchess, though she had been much snubbed, still persevered.
Now and again she would declare herself to be broken-hearted, and
would say that things might go their own way, that she would send in
her resignation, that she would retire into private life and milk
cows, that she would shake hands with no more parliamentary cads and
"caddesses,"--a word which her Grace condescended to coin for her own
use; that she would spend the next three years in travelling about
the world; and lastly, that, let there come of it whatever might, Sir
Orlando Drought should never again be invited into any house of which
she was the mistress. This last threat, which was perhaps the most
indiscreet of them all, she absolutely made good,--thereby adding
very greatly to her husband's difficulties.

But by the middle of June the parties at the house in Carlton Terrace
were as f