with redoubled energy.  In the Tudley End division, Aldous Raeburn was fighting a somewhat younger opponent of the same country-gentleman stock—­a former fag indeed of his at Eton—­whose zeal and fluency gave him plenty to do.  Under ordinary circumstances Aldous would have thrown himself with all his heart and mind into a contest which involved for him the most stimulating of possibilities, personal and public.  But, as these days went over, he found his appetite for the struggle flagging, and was harassed rather than spurred by his adversary’s activity.  The real truth was that he could not see enough of Marcella!  A curious uncertainty and unreality, moreover, seemed to have crept into some of their relations; and it had begun to gall and fever him that Wharton should be staying there, week after week, beside her, in her father’s house, able to spend all the free intervals of the fight in her society, strengthening an influence which Raeburn’s pride and delicacy had hardly allowed him as yet, in spite of his instinctive jealousy from the beginning, to take into his thoughts at all, but which was now apparent, not only to himself but to others.

In vain did he spend every possible hour at Mellor he could snatch from a conflict in which his party, his grandfather, and his own personal fortunes were all deeply interested.  In vain—­with a tardy instinct that it was to Mr. Boyce’s dislike of himself, and to the wilful fancy for Wharton’s society which this dislike had promoted, that Wharton’s long stay at Mellor was largely owing—­did Aldous subdue himself to propitiations and amenities wholly foreign to a strong character long accustomed to rule without thinking about it.  Mr. Boyce showed himself not a whit less partial to Wharton than before; pressed him at least twice in Raeburn’s hearing to make Mellor his head-quarters so long as it suited him, and behaved with an irritable malice with regard to some of the details of the wedding arrangements, which neither Mrs. Boyce’s indignation nor Marcella’s discomfort and annoyance could restrain.  Clearly there was in him a strong consciousness that by his attentions to the Radical candidate he was asserting his independence of the Raeburns, and nothing for the moment seemed to be more of an object with him, even though his daughter was going to marry the Raeburns’ heir.  Meanwhile, Wharton was always ready to walk or chat or play billiards with his host in the intervals of his own campaign; and his society had thus come to count considerably among the scanty daily pleasures of a sickly and disappointed man.  Mrs. Boyce did not like her guest, and took no pains to disguise it, least of all from Wharton.  But it seemed to be no longer possible for her to take the vigorous measures she would once have taken to get rid of him.