“He will make an excellent fight,” he said rather shortly.  “Dodgson hardly hopes to get in.  Harry Wharton is a most taking speaker, a very clever fellow, and sticks at nothing in the way of promises.  Ah, you will find him interesting, Miss Boyce!  He has a co-operative farm on his Lincolnshire property.  Last year he started a Labour paper—­which I believe you read.  I have heard you quote it.  He believes in all that you hope for—­great increase in local government and communal control—­the land for the people—­graduated income-tax—­the extinction of landlord and capitalist as soon as may be—­e tutti quanti.  He talks with great eloquence and ability.  In our villages I find he is making way every week.  The people think his manners perfect. ’’Ee ‘as a way wi’ un,’ said an old labourer to me last week.  ’If ’ee wor to coe the wild birds, I do believe, Muster Raeburn, they’d coom to un!’”

“Yet you dislike him!” said Marcella, a daring smile dancing on the dark face she turned to him.  “One can hear it in every word you say.”

He hesitated, trying, even at the moment that an impulse of jealous alarm which astonished himself had taken possession of him, to find the moderate and measured phrase.

“I have known him from a boy,” he said.  “He is a connection of the Levens, and used to be always there in old days.  He is very brilliant and very gifted—­”

“Your ‘but’ must be very bad,” she threw in, “it is so long in coming.”

“Then I will say, whatever opening it gives you,” he replied with spirit, “that I admire him without respecting him.”

“Who ever thought otherwise of a clever opponent?” she cried.  “It is the stock formula.”

The remark stung, all the more because Aldous was perfectly conscious that there was much truth in her implied charge of prejudice.  He had never been very capable of seeing this particular man in the dry light of reason, and was certainly less so than before, since it had been revealed to him that Wharton and Mr. Boyce’s daughter were to be brought, before long, into close neighbourhood.

“I am sorry that I seem to you such a Pharisee,” he said, turning upon her a look which had both pain and excitement in it.

She was silent, and they walked on a few yards without speaking.  The wood had thickened around them:  The high road was no longer visible.  No sound of wheels or footsteps reached them.  The sun struck freely through the beech-trees, already half bared, whitening the grey trunks at intervals to an arrowy distinctness and majesty, or kindling the slopes of red and freshly fallen leaves below into great patches of light and flame.  Through the stems, as always, the girdling blues of the plain, and in their faces a gay and buoyant breeze, speaking rather of spring than autumn.  Robins, “yellow autumn’s nightingales,” sang in the hedge to their right.  In the pause between them, sun, wind, birds made their charm felt.  Nature, perpetual chorus as she is to man, stole in, urging, wooing, defining.  Aldous’s heart leapt to the spur of a sudden resolve.