ed that Medland was supported now by a steady majority of not more
than eight: Coxon's defection could not fail to leave him in a minority;
for, although Coxon was a young man, and, as yet, of no great
independent weight in politics, he had acquired a factitious
importance, partly from the prestige of a successful University career
in England, still more from the fact that he was the only remaining
member of the Ministry to whom moderate men and vested interests could
look with any confidence. Shorn of him, as it had been shorn of Puttock,
the Government would stand revealed as the organ and expression of the
Labour Party and nothing else, and Perry and Kilshaw doubted not that
six or eight members of the House would be found to enter the "cave," if
Coxon showed them the way. Then,--"Why then," said Mr. Kilshaw to his
conscience, "we need not use that brute Benham at all! There's a nice
sop! Lie down like a good dog, and stop barking!"

Indeed, had it been quite certain that Benham's aid would not still
prove needful, Kilshaw would have been very glad to be rid of him.
Complete leisure and full pockets appeared not to be, in his case, a
favourable soil for the growth of virtue. No doubt Mr. Benham's position
was in some respects a hard one. All men who have money in plenty and
nothing to do claim from the wise a lenient judgment, and, besides these
disadvantages, Benham laboured under the possession of a secret--a
secret of mighty power. What wonder if he spent much of his day in
eating-houses and drinking-houses, obscurely hinting to admiring boon
companions of the thing he could do an he would? Then, having drunk his
fill, he would swagger, sometimes not over-steadily, out to the Park,
and amuse himself by scowling at the Premier, or smiling a smile of
hidden meaning at Daisy Medland, as they drove by. Also, he occasionally
got into trouble: one zealous partisan of the Premier's rewarded an
insinuation with a black eye, and Mr. Kilshaw's own servant, finding his
master's pensioner besieging the house in a state of drink-begotten
noisiness, kicked him down the street--an excess of zeal that cost Mr.
Kilshaw a cheque next day. The danger was, however, of a worse thing
than these. Kilshaw, suffering only what he doubtless deserved to
suffer, went on thorns of fear lest some day Benham should not only
explode his bomb prematurely, but publish to the world at whose charges
and under whose auspices the engineer was carrying