, with the divination of mothers,
declared that since the night of the opera house meeting Lorne had
been "all worked up." She watched him with furtive anxious looks, was
solicitous about his food, expressed relief when she knew him to be
safely in bed and asleep. He himself observed himself with discontent,
unable to fathom his extraordinary lapse from self-control on the night
of his final address. He charged it to the strain of unavoidable office
work on top of the business of the campaign, abused his nerves, talked
of a few days' rest when they had settled Winter. He could think of
nothing but the points he had forgotten when he had his great chance.
"The flag should have come in at the end," he would say to himself,
trying vainly to remember where it did come in. He was ill pleased with
the issue of that occasion; and it was small compensation to be told by
Stella that his speech gave her shivers up and down her back.

Meanwhile the theory of Empire coursed in his blood, fed by the
revelation of the future of his country in every newspaper, by the
calculated prophecies of American onlookers, and by the telegrams which
repeated the trumpet notes of Wallingham's war upon the mandarinate of
Great Britain. It occupied him so that he began to measure and limit
what he had to say about it, and to probe the casual eye for sympathy
before he would give an inch of rope to his enthusiasm. He found it as
hard as ever to understand that the public interest should be otherwise
preoccupied, as it plainly was, that the party organ, terrified of
Quebec, should shuffle away from the subject with perfunctory and
noncommittal reference, that among the men he met in the street,
nobody's blood seemed stirred, whatever the day's news was from England.
He subscribed to the Toronto Post, the leading organ of the Tories,
because of its fuller reports and more sympathetic treatment of the
Idea, due to the fact that the Idea originated in a brain temporarily
affiliated to the Conservative party. If the departure to imperial
preference had any damage in it for Canadian interests, it would be
for those which the Post made its special care; but the spirit of party
draws the breath of expediency, and the Post flaunting the Union Jack
every other day, put secondary manufactures aside for future discussion,
and tickled the wheat-growers with the two-shilling advantage they were
coming into at the hands of the English Conservatives, until Liberal
l