country labourers throughout democratic England if they would but put forward their own energies and quit themselves like men; pointed forward to a time of plenty, education, social peace; and so—­with some good-tempered banter of his opponent, old Dodgson, and some precise instructions as to how and where they were to record their votes on the day of election—­came to an end.  Two or three other speeches followed, and among them a few stumbling words from Hurd.  Marcella approved herself and applauded him, as she recognised a sentence or two taken bodily from the Labour Clarion of the preceding week.  Then a resolution pledging the meeting to support the Liberal candidate was passed unanimously amid evident excitement.  It was the first time that such a thing had ever happened in Mellor.

* * * * *

Mrs. Boyce treated her visitor on their way home with a new respect, mixed, however, as usual, with her prevailing irony.  For one who knew her, her manner implied, not that she liked him any more, but that a man so well trained to his own profession must always hold his own.

As for Marcella, she said little or nothing.  But Wharton, in the dark of the carriage, had a strange sense that her eye was often on him, that her mood marched with his, and that if he could have spoken her response would have been electric.

When he had helped her out of the carriage, and they stood in the vestibule—­Mrs. Boyce having walked on into the hall—­he said to her, his voice hoarse with fatigue: 

“Did I do your bidding, did I rouse them?”

Marcella was seized with sudden shyness.

“You rated them enough.”

“Well, did you disapprove?”

“Oh, no! it seems to be your way.”

“My proof of friendship?  Well, can there be a greater?  Will you show me some to-morrow?”

“How can I?”

“Will you criticise?—­tell me where you thought I was a fool to-night, or a hypocrite?  Your mother would.”

“I dare say!” said Marcella, her breath quickening; “but don’t expect it from me.”

“Why?”

“Because—­because I don’t pretend.  I don’t know whether you roused them, but you roused me.”

She swept on before him into the dark hall, without giving him a moment for reply, took her candle, and disappeared.

Wharton found his own staircase, and went up to bed.  The light he carried showed his smiling eyes bent on the ground, his mouth still moving as though with some pleasant desire of speech.

CHAPTER VII.

Wharton was sitting alone in the big Mellor drawing-room, after dinner.  He had drawn one of the few easy chairs the room possessed to the fire, and with his feet on the fender, and one of Mr. Boyce’s French novels on his knee, he was intensely enjoying a moment of physical ease.  The work of these weeks of canvassing and speaking had been arduous, and he was naturally indolent.  Now, beside this fire and at a distance, it amazed him that any motive whatever, public or private, should ever have been strong enough to take him out through the mire on these winter nights to spout himself hoarse to a parcel of rustics.  “What did I do it for?” he asked himself; “what am I going to do it for again to-morrow?”