k his cup; "don't
you think you had better go at once and change?"

"I'm all right," he said shortly--"as right as I'm likely to be, anyway.
As for the shooting, it's nothing but waste of time and shoe leather. I
shan't go out any more. The place has been clean swept by some of those
brutes in the village--your friends, Marcella. By the way, Evelyn, I
came across young Wharton in the road just now."

"Wharton?" said his wife, interrogatively. "I don't remember--ought I?"

"Why, the Liberal candidate for the division, of course," he said
testily. "I wish you would inform yourself of what goes on. He is
working like a horse, he tells me. Dodgson, the Raeburns' candidate, has
got a great start; this young man will want all his time to catch him
up. I like him. I won't vote for him; but I'll see fair play. I've asked
him to come to tea here on Saturday, Evelyn. He'll be back again by the
end of the week. He stays at Dell's farm when he comes--pretty bad
accommodation, I should think. We must show him some civility."

He rose and stood with his back to the fire, his spare frame stiffening
under his nervous determination to assert himself--to hold up his head
physically and morally against those who would repress him.

Richard Boyce took his social punishment badly. He had passed his first
weeks at Mellor in a tremble of desire that his father's old family and
country friends should recognise him again and condone his
"irregularities." All sorts of conciliatory ideas had passed through
his head. He meant to let people see that he would be a good neighbour
if they would give him the chance--not like that miserly fool, his
brother Robert. The past was so much past; who now was more respectable
or more well intentioned than he? He was an impressionable imaginative
man in delicate health; and the tears sometimes came into his eyes as he
pictured himself restored to society--partly by his own efforts,
partly, no doubt, by the charms and good looks of his wife and
daughter--forgiven for their sake, and for the sake also of that store
of virtue he had so laboriously accumulated since that long-past
catastrophe. Would not most men have gone to the bad altogether, after
such a lapse? He, on the contrary, had recovered himself, had neither
drunk nor squandered, nor deserted his wife and child. These things, if
the truth were known, were indeed due rather to a certain lack of
physical energy and vitality, which age had developed in