alize and fly away. Neither had he, for his personal honour,
any morbid desires toward White Clam Shell or Finnigan's cat. His luck
had been a good deal better than it might have been; he recognized that
as fully as any sensible young man could, and as for the Great Chance,
and the queer grip it had on him, he would have argued that too if
anyone had approached him curiously about it. There I think we might
doubt his conclusions. There is nothing subtler, more elusive to trace
than the intercurrents of the emotions. Politics and love are thought
of at opposite poles, and Wallingham perhaps would have laughed to know
that he owed an exalted allegiance in part to a half-broken heart. Yet
the impulse that is beyond our calculation, the thing we know potential
in the blood but not to be summoned or conditioned, lies always in the
shadow of the ideal; and who can analyse that, and say, "Of this class
is the will to believe in the integrity of the beloved and false;
of that is the desire to lift a nation to the level of its
mountain-ranges"? Both dispositions have a tendency to overwork the
heart; and it is easy to imagine that they might interact. Lorne
Murchison's wish, which was indeed a burning longing and necessity,
to believe in the Dora Milburn of his passion, had been under a strain
since the night on which he brought her the pledge which she refused
to wear. He had hardly been conscious of it in the beginning, but by
constant suggestion it had grown into his knowledge, and for weeks he
had taken poignant account of it. His election had brought him no nearer
a settlement with her objection to letting the world know of their
relations. The immediate announcement that it was to be disputed gave
Dora another chance, and once again postponed the assurance that he
longed for with a fever which was his own condemnation of her, if he
could have read that sign. For months he had seen so little of her, had
so altered his constant habit of going to the Milburns', that his family
talked of it, wondering among themselves; and Stella indulged in hopeful
speculations. They did not wonder or speculate at the Milburns'. It was
an axiom there that it is well to do nothing rashly.

Lorne, in the office on Market Street, had been replying to Mr Fulke to
the effect that the convention could hardly be much longer postponed,
but that as yet he had no word of the date of it when the telephone bell
rang and Mr Farquharson's voice at the other