of the prim dignity of the school-mistress. "Miss Cooke, will you collect the children and bring them into the house?"
And, avoiding his eyes, she led the way across the road to the door of one of the houses. He followed, but reluctantly, and after a moment of hesitation. He detested the scene which he now foresaw, and bitterly regretted that he had ever set foot inside Queen's Square. To be suspected of thrusting an intrigue upon a little schoolmistress, to be dragged, with a pack of staring, chattering children in his train, before some grim-faced duenna-he, a man of years and affairs, with whom the Chancellor of England did not scorn to speak on equal terms! It was hateful; it was an intolerable position. Yet to turn back, to say that he would not go, was to acknowledge himself guilty. He wished-he wished to heaven that he had never seen the girl. Or at least that he had had the courage, when she first denied the thing, to throw the parcel on the seat and go.
It was not an heroic frame of mind; but neither was the position heroic. And something may be forgiven him in the circumstances.
Fortunately the trial was short. She opened the door of the house, and on the threshold he found himself face to face with a tall, bulky woman, with a double chin, and an absurdly powdered nose, who wore a cameo of the late Queen Charlotte on her ample bosom. Miss Sibson had viewed the encounter from an upper window, and her face was a picture of displeasure, slightly tempered by powder.
"What is this?" she asked, in an intimidating voice. "Miss Smith, what is this, if you please?"
Perhaps Mary, aware that her place was at stake, was desperate. At any rate she behaved with a dignity which astonished Vaughan. "This gentleman, Madam," she explained, speaking with firmness though her face was on fire, "travelled with me on the coach yesterday. A few minutes ago he appeared and addressed me, and insisted that the-the parcel he carries is mine, and that I left it in the coach. It is not mine, and I have not seen it before."
Miss Sibson folded her arms upon her ample person. The position was not altogether new to her.
"Sir," she said, eying the offender majestically, "have you any explanation to offer-of this extraordinary conduct?"
He had, indeed. As clearly as his temper permitted he told his tale, his tone half ironical, half furious.
When he paused, "Who do you say gave it to you?" Miss Sibson asked in a deep voice.
"I do not know her name. A lady who travelled in the coach."
Miss Sibson's frown grew even deeper. "Thank you," she replied, "that will do. I have heard enough, and I understand. I understand, sir. Be good enough to leave the house."
"But, Madam-"
"Be good enough to leave the house," she repeated. "That is the door," pointing to it. "That is the door, sir! Any apology you may wish to make, you can make by letter to me. To me, you understand! I think one were not ill-fitting!"
He lost his temper altogether at that, and he flung the parcel with violence, and with a violent word, on a chair. "Then at any rate I shall not take that, for it's not mine!" he cried. "You may keep it, Madam!"
And he flung out, his retreat hampered and made humiliating by the entrance of the pupils, who, marshalled by the round-eyed one, and all round-eyed themselves, blocked the doorway at that unlucky moment. He broke through them without ceremony, though they represented the most respectable families in Bristol, and with his head bent he strode wrathfully across the Square.
To be turned out of a girls' boarding-school! To be shown the door like some wretched philandering schoolboy, or a subaltern in his first folly! He, the man of the world, of experience, of ambition! The man with a career! He was furious.
"The little cat!" he cried as he went. "I wish I had never seen her face! What a fool, what a fool I was to come!"
Unheroic words and an unheroic mood. But though there were heroes before Agamemnon, it is not certain that there were any after George the Fourth. At any rate, any who, like that great man, were heroic always and in all circumstances.
Probably Vaughan would have forgiven the little cat had he known that she was at that moment weeping very bitterly, with her face plunged into the pillow of her not over-luxurious bed. For she was young, and a woman. And because, in her position, the name of love was taboo; because to her the admiring look, which to a more fortunate sister was homage, was an insult; because the petits soins, the flower, the note, the trifle that to another were more precious than jewels, were not for her, it did not follow that she was not flesh and blood, that she had not feeling, affection, passion. True, the pang was soon deadened, for habit is strong. True, the bitter tears were soon dried, for employers like not gloomy looks. True, she soon cried shame on her own discontent, for she was good as gold. And yet to be debarred, in the tender springtime, from the sweet scents, the budding blooms, the gay carols, to have but one April coach-ride in a desert of days, is hard-is very hard. Mary Smith, weeping on her hopeless pillow-not without thought of the cruel arch stooping to crush her, the cruel fate from which he had snatched her, not without thought of her own ingratitude, her black ingratitude-felt that it was hard, very hard.
IX
THE BILL FOR GIVING EVERYBODYEVERYTHING!
It is difficult to describe and impossible to exaggerate the heat of public feeling which preceded the elections of '31. Four-fifths of the people of this country believed that the Bill-from which they expected so much that a satirist has aptly given it the title at the head of this chapter-had been defeated in the late House by a trick. That trick the King, God bless him, had punished by dissolving the House. It remained for the people to show their sense of the trick by returning a very different House; such a House as would not only pass the Bill, but pass it by a majority so decisive that the Lords, and particularly the Bench of Bishops, whose hostility was known, would not dare to oppose the public will.
But as no more than a small proportion of these four-fifths had votes, they were forced to act, if they would make their will obeyed, indirectly; in one place by the legitimate pressure of public opinion, in another by bribery, in a third by intimidation, in a fourth, and a fifth, and a sixth by open violence; everywhere by the unspoken threat of revolution. And hence arose the one good, sound, and firm argument against the Bill which the Tory party enjoyed.
One or two of their other arguments are not without interest, if only as the defence set up for a system so anomalous as to seem to us incredible-a system under which Gatton, with no inhabitants, returned two members, and Sheffield, with something like a hundred thousand inhabitants, returned none; under which Dunwich, long drowned under the North Sea, returned two members, and Birmingham returned none; under which the City of London returned four and Lord Lonsdale returned nine; under which Cornwall, with one-fourth of the population of Lancashire, returned thrice as many representatives; under which the South vastly outweighed the North, and land mightily outweighed all other property.
Moreover, in no two boroughs was the franchise the same. One man lived in a hovel and had a vote; his neighbour lived in a mansion and had no vote. Frequently the whole of the well-to-do townsfolk were voteless. Then, while any man with five thousand pounds might buy a seat, nor see the face of a single elector, on the other hand, the poll might be kept open for fifteen days, and a single county election might cost two hundred thousand pounds. Bribery, forbidden in theory, was permitted in practice. The very Government bribed under the rose, and it was humorously said that all that a man's constituents required was to be satisfied of the impurity of his intentions!
An anomalous system; yet its defenders had something to say for it.
First, that narrow as the franchise seemed, every class found somewhere in England its mouthpiece. At Preston, where all could vote who
