After Mutimer, Alfred Waltham had probably more genuine satisfaction in the ceremony than any one else present.  Mr. Westlake he was not quite satisfied with; there was a mildness and restraint about the style of the address which to Alfred’s taste smacked of feebleness; he was for Cambyses’ vein.  Still it rejoiced him to hear the noble truths of democracy delivered as it were from the bema.  To a certain order of intellect the word addressed by the living voice to an attentive assembly is always vastly impressive; when the word coincides with private sentiment it excites enthusiasm.  Alfred hated the aristocratic order of things with a rabid hatred.  In practice he could be as coarsely overbearing with his social inferiors as that scion of the nobility—­existing of course somewhere—­who bears the bell for feebleness of the pia mater; but that made him none the less a sound Radical.  In thinking of the upper classes he always thought of Hubert Eldon, and that name was scarlet to him.  Never trust the thoroughness of the man who is a revolutionist on abstract principles; personal feeling alone goes to the root of the matter.

Many were the gentlemen to whom Alfred had the happiness of being introduced in the course of the day.  Among others was Mr. Keene the journalist.  At the end of a lively conversation Mr. Keene brought out a copy of the ‘Belwick Chronicle,’ that day’s issue.

‘You’ll find a few things of mine here,’ he said.  ’Put it in your pocket, and look at it afterwards.  By-the-by, there is a paragraph marked; I meant it for Mutimer.  Never mind, give it him when you’ve done with it.’

Alfred bestowed the paper in the breast pocket of his greatcoat, and did not happen to think of it again till late that evening.  His discovery of it at length was not the only event of the day which came just too late for the happiness of one with whose fortunes we are concerned.

A little after dark, when the bell was ringing which summoned Mutimer’s workpeople to the tea provided for them, Hubert Eldon was approaching the village by the road from Agworth:  he was on foot, and had chosen his time in order to enter Wanley unnoticed.  His former visit, when he was refused at the Walthams’ door, had been paid at an impulse; he had come down from London by an early train, and did not even call to see his mother at her new house in Agworth.  Nor did ho visit her on his way back; he walked straight to the railway station and took the first train townwards.  To-day he came in a more leisurely way.  It was certain news contained in a letter from his mother which brought him, and with her he spent some hours before starting to walk towards Wanley.

‘I hear,’ Mrs. Eldon had written, ’from Wanley something which really surprises me.  They say that Adela Waltham is going to marry Mr. Mutimer.  The match is surely a very strange one.  I am only fearful that it is the making of interested people, and that the poor girl herself has not had much voice in deciding her own fate.  Oh, this money!  Adela was worthy of better things.’