“He’s likely dead by now!  Oh Larry!” he cried, panting in his eagerness.  “May be the chance has come at last!  I believe you might be the man Ireland wants!  I believe you might take Parnell’s place!  Me fawther says you’re certain to be nominated, and there’s no opposition, of course.  Anyhow, if there were, itself, you’d go in flying, just the same!  You’re the man we’re all waiting for!  Larry, old cock!  The day will come when I’ll be bragging that I was the one first gave you the notion to go into politics!”

Larry was gazing at his man of business, whose aspect, it may be conceded, was at this moment singularly at variance with the usual conception of such a functionary.  The man of business gazed back at him, the glow intensifying behind his eye-glasses and gathering energy from the answering gleam in Larry’s eyes.

“The Bloody Wars!” uttered Larry, slowly and quite irrelevantly, and with great emphasis.  “By all the crosses in a yard of check!  Let me hold on to something and think!  This is a game and a half!  I must think furiously!”

“Do not!” exclaimed Barty; “don’t think at all!  Don’t be wasting time like that!  No man ever had a greater chance than this!  Lep at it, Larry, old lad!  Give me the word I want, and I’ll wire the Doctor to-night—­a message he’ll understand, and no one else.  Oh Larry!” he implored, “don’t cry off now!  You’ve pots of money; you can do any damn thing you like!  If you refuse this chance now you’ll only regret it the once, and that’ll be all your life!”

Then did that mysterious and mighty agency, the warp that a mind has received in childhood, come to reinforce the enthusiasms and ambitions of youth, and urge Larry to assent.  That other and nobler Spirit of the Nation woke, and the passionate, irreconcilable voice, that had first spoken to him when he was a little boy, woke and uttered itself again, shouting to him its wild summons at a moment when the tide of life was running fiercest in him, when every emotion was at highest pressure and calling for great adventure.

“All right, Barty, my son, I’m for it!” said Larry, with the assumption of outward calm, when heart and pulses are pounding, that has been claimed as one of the assets of a public school education, and is, even without that advantage, the birthright of such as young Mr. Coppinger.

CHAPTER XXX

Larry bicycled up to the white chapel on the hill, to Second Mass, on the following morning.  He rode fast through the converging groups of people, on foot, on outside cars, in carts, on horseback.  It was four years since he had last attended a service there, and to many of the assembled congregation he had become a stranger.  None the less there was no hesitation in any man’s mind in identifying him; these were people who knew a gentleman when they saw one, and the young owner of Coppinger’s Court was the only gentleman ever to be seen at the white chapel on the hill.