ne reference to business for Walter Winter. The Dominion had
come up the day before with the announcement that Mr Robert Farquharson
who, for an aggregate of eleven years, had represented the Liberals of
South Fox in the Canadian House of Commons, had been compelled under
medical advice to withdraw from public life. The news was unexpected,
and there was rather a feeling among Mr Farquharson's local support in
Elgin that it shouldn't have come from Toronto. It will be gathered
that Horace Williams, as he himself acknowledged, was wild. The general
feeling, and to some extent Mr Williams's, was appeased by the further
information that Mr Farquharson had been obliged to go to Toronto to
see a specialist, whose report he had naturally enough taken to party
headquarters, whence the Dominion would get it, as Mr Williams said, by
telephone or any quicker way there was. Williams, it should be added,
was well ahead with the details, as considerate as was consistent with
public enterprise, of the retiring member's malady, its duration,
the date of the earliest symptoms, and the growth of anxiety in Mrs
Farquharson, who had finally insisted--and how right she was!--on the
visit to the specialist, upon which she had accompanied Mr Farquharson.
He sent round Rawlins. So that Elgin was in possession of all the facts,
and Walter Winter, who had every pretension to contest the seat again
and every satisfaction that it wouldn't be against Farquharson,
might naturally be expected to be taken up with them sufficiently to
understand a man who slapped him on the shoulder in the post-office with
the remark I have quoted.

"I guess they know what they're about," returned Mr Milburn. "It's a bad
knock for the Grits, old Farquharson having to drop out. He's getting up
in years, but he's got a great hold here. He'll be a dead loss in votes
to his party. I always said our side wouldn't have a chance till the old
man was out of the way."

Mr Winter twisted the watch-chain across his protuberant waistcoat, and
his chin sank in reflective folds above his neck-tie. Above that again
his nose drooped over his moustache, and his eyelids over his eyes,
which sought the floor. Altogether he looked sunk, like an overfed bird,
in deferential contemplation of what Mr Milburn was saying.

"They've nobody to touch him, certainly in either ability or
experience," he replied, looking up to do it, with a handsome air of
concession. "Now that Martin's dead, and