“One of my very greatest,” Dora replied.  “I know he’ll expect Father to vote for him.  It makes it awfully embarrassing for me.”

“Oh, I fancy he’ll understand!” said Hesketh, easily.  “Political convictions are serious things, you know.  Friendship isn’t supposed to interfere with them.  I wonder,” he went on, meditatively, “whether I could be of any use to Murchison.  Now that I’ve made up my mind to stop till after Christmas I’ll be on hand for the fight.  I’ve had some experience.  I used to canvass now and then from Oxford; it was always a tremendous lark.”

“Oh, Mr Hesketh, do!  Really and truly he is one of my oldest friends, and I should love to see him get in.  I know his sister, too.  They’re a very clever family.  Quite self-made, you know, but highly respected.  Promise me you will.”

“I promise with pleasure.  And I wish it were something it would give me more trouble to perform.  I like Murchison,” said Hesketh.

All this transpiring while they were supposed to be eating green-gage preserves, and Mrs Milburn and Miss Filkin endeavoured to engage the head of the house in the kind of easy allusion to affairs of the moment to which Mr Hesketh would be accustomed as a form of conversation—­the accident to the German Empress, the marriage of one of the Rothschilds.  The ladies were compelled to supply most of the facts and all of the interest but they kept up a gallant line of attack; and the young man, taking gratified possession of Dora’s eyes, was extremely obliged to them.

Hesketh lost no time in communicating his willingness to be of use to Murchison, and Lorne felt all his old friendliness rise up in him as he cordially accepted the offer.  It was made with British heartiness, it was thoroughly meant.  Lorne was half-ashamed in his recognition of its quality.  A certain aloofness had grown in him against his will since Hesketh had prolonged his stay in the town, difficult to justify, impossible to define.  Hesketh as Hesketh was worthily admirable as ever, wholesome and agreeable, as well turned out by his conscience as he was by his tailor; it was Hesketh in his relation to his new environment that seemed vaguely to come short.  This in spite of an enthusiasm which was genuine enough; he found plenty of things to like about the country.  It was perhaps in some manifestation of sensitiveness that he failed; he had the adaptability of the pioneer among rugged conditions, but he could not mingle quite immediately with the essence of them; he did not perceive the genius loci.  Lorne had been conscious of this as a kind of undefined grievance; now he specified it and put it down to Hesketh’s isolation among ways that were different from the ways he knew.  You were bound to notice that Hesketh as a stranger had his own point of view, his own training to retreat upon.

“I certainly liked him better over there,” Lorne told Advena, “but then he was a part of it—­he wasn’t separated out as he is here.  He was just one sort of fellow that you admired, and there were lots of sorts that you admired more.  Over here you seem to see round him somehow.”