e to its senses; Sir
Winterton was affable again, Lady Mildmay was canvassing, and Mr. Smiley
had high hopes. Despondency would have fallen on Foster's spirit but for
the report of Quisante's exploits, performed in the teeth of the orders
of that same Dr. Tillman who had given Sir Winterton such excellent
unprofessional advice touching the affair of Tom Sinnett. He gave
Quisante just as good counsel, and with just as little result. Then he
tried Quisante's wife and found in her what he thought a hardness or an
insensibility, or, if that were an unjust view, a sort of fatalism which
forbade her to seek to interfere, and reduced her to being a spectator of
her husband's doings and destiny rather than a partner in them.

"How can he lie by now?" she asked. "It's impossible; he must see this
out whatever happens." Quisante had said exactly the same thing, but his
wife's perfect agreement in it seemed strange to the doctor. It was
making the man's success more than the man; there was too much of the
Spartan wife about it, without the Spartan wife's excuse of patriotism.
Something of these feelings found expression in the look with which he
regarded May, and he allowed himself to express them more freely to Lady
Mildmay, who would have disappointed the most important meeting sooner
than face the risk of Sir Winterton's taking cold. He told her how May
had said, "He won't stand being coddled," and then had added, with a
frankness which the doctor had not become accustomed to, "Besides I
should never do it. We aren't in the least like that to one another."

"I felt rather sorry for the man," said the doctor. "It's as if he was a
racehorse, and they didn't think so much about him as about a win for
the stable."

"Do you like him?" asked Lady Mildmay, merely in natural curiosity. But
the doctor started a little as he answered, "Why, no, I don't like him
at all." And as he drove home he was thoughtful.

"Well, here we are at last!" said Jimmy Benyon as he sat down to
breakfast on the morning of the polling day. "I'm told Mildmay's people
were asking for six to four last night. Where's Quisante?"

"He went out just before eight, to catch some of the men who work on the
line and can't be back to vote in the evening," said May.

"Lord!" sighed Jimmy in a self-reproachful tone; it was past nine now,
and he was only just out of bed. "What are you going to do?"

"Drive and bow and smile and shake hands," said May. "And you're goin