d-bearers would have told you, had little use for rhetoric. The
articles were competent: if you listened to Horace Williams you would
have been obliged to accept them as the last, or latest, word of
economic truth, though it must be left to history to endorse Mr
Williams. It was their enthusiasm, however, that gave them the wing on
which they travelled. People naturally took different views, even of
this quality. "Young Murchison's working the imperial idea for all it's
worth," was Walter Winter's; and Octavius Milburn humorously summed up
the series as "tall talk."

Alfred Hesketh came, it was felt, rather opportunely into the midst of
this. Plenty of people, the whole of Market Square and East Elgin, a
good part, too, probably, of the Town Ward, were unaware of his arrival;
but for the little world he penetrated he was clothed with all the
interest of the great contingency. His decorous head in the Emmetts'
pew on Sunday morning stood for a symbol as well as for a stranger.
The nation was on the eve of a great far-reaching transaction with the
mother country, and thrilling with the terms of the bargain. Hesketh
was regarded by people in Elgin who knew who he was with the mingled
cordiality and distrust that might have met a principal. They did not
perhaps say it, but it was in their minds. "There's one of them," was
what they thought when they met him in the street. At any other time he
would have been just an Englishman; now he was invested with the very
romance of destiny. The perception was obscure, but it was there.
Hesketh, on the other hand, found these good people a very well-dressed,
well-conditioned, decent lot, rather sallower than he expected, perhaps,
who seemed to live in a fair-sized town in a great deal of comfort, and
was wholly unconscious of anything special in his relation to them or
theirs to him.

He met Lorne just outside the office of Warner, Fulke, and Murchison the
following day. They greeted heartily. "Now this IS good!" said Lorne,
and he thought so. Hesketh confided his first impression. "It's not
unlike an English country town," he said, "only the streets are wider,
and the people don't look so much in earnest."

"Oh, they're just as much in earnest some of the time," Lorne laughed,
"but maybe not all the time!"

The sun shone crisply round them; there was a brisk October market; on
the other side of the road Elmore Crow dangled his long legs over a cart
flap and chewed a cheroot. Elgi