the first few weeks, that their
young candidate was a trifle overbitten with it, though remonstrance
had been a good deal curbed by Murchison's treatment of it. When he
had brought it forward at the late fall fairs and in the lonely country
schoolhouses, his talk had been so trenchant, so vivid and pictorial,
that the gathered farmers listened with open mouths, like children,
pathetically used with life, to a grown-up fairy tale. As Horace
Williams said, if a dead horse could be made to go this one would have
brought Murchison romping in. And Lorne had taken heed to the counsel of
his party leaders. At joint meetings, which offered the enemy his best
opportunity for travesty and derision, he had left it in the background
of debate, devoting himself to arguments of more immediate utility. In
the literature of the campaign it glowed with prospective benefit, but
vaguely, like a halo of Liberal conception and possible achievement,
waiting for the word from overseas. The Express still approved it, but
not in headlines, and wished the fact to be widely understood that while
the imperial idea was a very big idea, the Liberals of South Fox were
going to win this election without any assistance from it.

Lorne submitted. After all, victory was the thing. There could be no
conquest for the idea without the party triumph first. He submitted,
but his heart rebelled. He looked over the subdivisional reports with
Williams and Farquharson, and gave ear to their warning interpretations;
but his heart was an optimist, and turned always to the splendid
projection upon the future that was so incomparably the title to success
of those who would unite to further it. His mind accepted the old
working formulas for dealing with an average electorate, but to his
eager apprehending heart it seemed unbelievable that the great imperial
possibility, the dramatic chance for the race that hung even now, in
the history of the world, between the rising and the setting of the sun,
should fail to be perceived and acknowledged as the paramount issue, the
contingency which made the by-election of South Fox an extraordinary and
momentous affair. He believed in the Idea; he saw it, with Wallingham,
not only a glorious prospect, but an educative force; and never had he
a moment of such despondency that it confounded him upon his horizon in
the faded colours of some old Elizabethan mirage.

The opera house, the night of Mr Murchison's final address to the
el