Legge, the
partner, pooh-poohed the idea that Dagworthy was secretly married. But
Mr. Legge might know as little as other people.

There were circles in Dunfield in which another and quite a different
myth grew up around the name of Emily Hood. The Cartwrights originated
it. They too had received a mysterious note of farewell, and their
interpretation was this Emily, they held, had gone to London, there to
be happily married to a certain Mr. Athel, a gentleman of aristocratic
appearance and enormously wealthy. Mrs. Baxendale heard this story now
and again; she neither affirmed nor contradicted. Jessie Cartwright
reflected much on Emily's slyness in keeping her affairs so secret. She
was not as envious as she would have been but for a certain compact
which she was determined should not--if it lay in her power to prevent
it--be some day laughed away as a mere joke. And had she not received,
on the very eve of Dagworthy's departure, a box of gloves, which could
only come from one person?

The second myth holds its ground, I believe, to the present day. The
more mischievous fable was refuted before very long, but only when it
had borne results for Wilfrid practically the same as if it had been a
truth.

CHAPTER XX

WILFRID THE LEGISLATOR

Let time and change do their work for six years and six months, their
building and their destroying, their ripening for love, their ripening
for death. Then we take our way to the Capital, for, behold, it is
mid-season; the sun of late June is warm upon the many-charioted
streets, upon the parks where fashion's progress circles to the 'Io
Triumphe' of regardant throngs, even upon the quarters where life knows
but one perennial season, that of toil. The air is voiceful; every house
which boasts a drawing-room gathers its five o'clock choir; every
theatre, every concert-room resounds beneath the summer night; in the
halls of Westminster is the culmination of sustained utterance. There,
last night, the young member for a Surrey borough made his maiden
speech; his name, Mr. Wilfrid Athel.

The speech was better reported than such are wont to be, for it
contained clever things, and quite surprisingly resembled in its tone of
easy confidence and its mastery of relevant facts the deliverances of
men of weight in politics. It had elicited a compliment from a leader of
the opposing party; it had occasioned raisings of the eyebrows in
capable judges, and had led to remarks that a yo