Mallinson began immediately to imagine himself in Drake’s position, the candidate for whom brass bands played, and hats went spinning into the air.  And it needed no conscious effort for one so agile in egotistical leaps to spring thence to the fancy that Drake was a kind of vicarious substitute for himself, doing his work, too, not without blemishes.

Ten days before the polling-day Fielding ran down from town, and attended a meeting at the Town Hall, at which both Drake and Mallinson were to speak.  He sat on the platform by Clarice’s side and paid some attention to her manner during the evening.  He noticed the colour mount in her cheeks and her eyes kindle, as on first entering the room she looked down upon the crowded floor.  The chairs had been removed, and the audience stood packed beneath the flaring gas-jets—­artificers for the most part, their white faces smeared and stained with the grime of their factories.  The roar of applause as Drake rose by the table swelled up to three cheers in consonance, and a subsequent singing of ’For he’s a jolly good fellow’ stirred even Fielding to enthusiasm.  He noted that feeling of enthusiasm as strange in himself, and had a thought in consequence that such scenes were hardly of the kind to help Clarice to the rest she needed.  The hall for a moment became a sea of tossing handkerchiefs.  He took a glance at Clarice.  She sat bent forward with parted lips and a bosom that heaved.  Fielding turned on his cold-water tap of flippancy.

‘It’s a bad omen,’ said he, with a nod towards the waving handkerchiefs.  ‘They hang out flags of surrender.’

‘Hardly,’ she replied, with a smile.  ’I can’t recognise that the flags are white’; and she added, ’I should like it less if they were.  These men are the workers.’

‘The workers.’  Fielding could hear Drake uttering the word in just the same tone, and his compassion for Clarice deepened.  Why? he asked himself.  The girl was undergoing not a jot more punishment than a not over-rigid political justice would have meted out to her.  The question inexplicably raised to view a pair of the clearest blue eyes, laughing from between the blackest of eyelashes.  He promptly turned his attention to the speaker at the table.

Drake commenced that night with an apology.  It was necessary that he should speak about himself.  An utterly baseless story had, within the last few days, and doubtless with a view to this election, been revived by the London evening paper which originally made it.  He regretted also to notice that his opponent had accepted the story, and was making use of it to prejudice him in the eyes of the electors.  Accordingly he felt bound to put the facts simply and briefly before his audience, although the indifference of the Colonial Office to what, if true, was a crime committed by an Englishman on English soil, and against practically English subjects, in effect acquitted him of the charge.