their skin. The third time
she hinted vaguely that there was "another." The star of Abinger
Vennard was now blazing in the firmament, and she had conceived a
platonic admiration for him. The truth is that Miss Claudia, with all
her cleverness, was very young and--dare I say it?--rather silly.

Caerlaverock was stroking his beard, his legs astraddle on the
hearthrug, with something appallingly viceregal in his air, when Mr.
and Mrs. Alexander Cargill were announced. The Home Secretary was a
joy to behold. He had the face of an elderly and pious bookmaker, and
a voice in which lurked the indescribable Scotch quality of "unction."
When he was talking you had only to shut your eyes to imagine yourself
in some lowland kirk on a hot Sabbath morning. He had been a
distinguished advocate before he left the law for politics, and had
swayed juries of his countrymen at his will. The man was
extraordinarily efficient on a platform. There were unplumbed depths
of emotion in his eye, a juicy sentiment in his voice, an overpowering
tenderness in his manner, which gave to politics the glamour of a
revival meeting. He wallowed in obvious pathos, and his hearers, often
unwillingly, wallowed with him. I have never listened to any orator at
once so offensive and so horribly effective. There was no appeal too
base for him, and none too august: by some subtle alchemy he blended
the arts of the prophet and the fishwife. He had discovered a new kind
of language. Instead of "the hungry millions," or "the toilers," or
any of the numerous synonyms for our masters, he invented the phrase,
"Goad's people." "I shall never rest," so ran his great declaration,
"till Goad's green fields and Goad's clear waters are free to Goad's
people." I remember how on this occasion he pressed my hand with his
famous cordiality, looked gravely and earnestly into my face, and then
gazed sternly into vacancy. It was a fine picture of genius descending
for a moment from its hill-top to show how close it was to poor
humanity.

Then came Lord Mulross, a respectable troglodytic peer, who represented
the one sluggish element in a swiftly progressing Government. He was
an oldish man with bushy whiskers and a reputed mastery of the French
tongue. A Whig, who had never changed his creed one iota, he was
highly valued by the country as a sober element in the nation's
councils, and endured by the Cabinet as necessary ballast. He did not
conceal his dislik