“I shall decide that for myself,” she said, lightly.  Then—­after a pause:  “So Lord Philip has won!—­all along the line!  I should like to know that man!”

“You do know him.”

“Oh, just to pass the time of day.  That’s nothing.  But I am to meet him at the Treshams’ next week.”  Her eyes sparkled a little.  Marsham glanced at his sister, who was gathering up some small possessions at the end of the room.

“Don’t try and make a fool of him!” he said, in a low voice.  “He’s not your sort.”

“Isn’t he?” She laughed.  “I suppose he’s one of the biggest men in England now.  And somebody told me the other day that, after losing two or three fortunes, he had just got another.”

Marsham nodded.

“Altogether, an excellent parti.”

Alicia’s infectious laugh broke out.  She sat down beside him, with her hands round her knees.

“You look miles better than when you came in.  But I think—­you’d better go to bed.”

* * * * *

As Marsham, in undressing, flung his coat upon a chair, the copy of the Herald which he had momentarily forgotten fell out of the inner pocket.  He raised it—­irresolute.  Should he tear it up, and throw the fragments away?

No.  He could not bring himself to do it.  It was as though Ferrier, lying still and cold at Lytchett, would know of it—­as though the act would do some roughness to the dead.

He went into his sitting-room, found an empty drawer in his writing-table, thrust in the newspaper, and closed the drawer.

CHAPTER XX

“I regard this second appeal to West Brookshire as an insult!” said the Vicar of Beechcote, hotly.  “If Mr. Marsham must needs accept an office that involved re-election he might have gone elsewhere.  I see there is already a vacancy by death—­and a Liberal seat, too—­in Sussex. We told him pretty plainly what we thought of him last time.”

“And now I suppose you will turn him out?” asked the doctor, lazily.  In the beatitude induced by a completed article and an afternoon smoke, he was for the moment incapable of taking a tragic view either of Marsham’s shortcomings or his prospects.

“Certainly, we shall turn him out.”

“Ah!—­a Labor candidate?” said the doctor, showing a little more energy.

Whereupon the Vicar, with as strong a relish for the primeur of an important piece of news as any secular fighter, described a meeting held the night before in one of the mining villages, at which he had been a speaker.  The meeting had decided to run a miners’ candidate; expenses had been guaranteed; and the resolution passed meant, according to Lavery, that Marsham would be badly beaten, and that Colonel Simpson, his Conservative opponent, would be handsomely presented with a seat in Parliament, to which his own personal merits had no claim whatever.