As the polling day approached, and effort became more strenuous, Larry fell ever more gratefully into the habit of No. 6, The Mall.  Of coming in, in the gloom of the wet afternoon, and finding Tishy mending her gloves, or stitching something all lace and ribbons, something that would obviously blossom into a “Sunday blouse,” but that, with flash of her grey eyes, she would tell him was “poor-clothes,’ that the Nuns had asked her to make.  Of sitting on the big sofa beside her, and teasing her about Captain Cloherty and the adventure in which Tinker took a leading part.

“If you go telling tales to the Doctor, you’ll be sorry!”

“How can you make me sorry?”

“Wait awhile and you’ll find out!  There are plenty ways to teach little boys manners!  Oh, look now what you’ve done!  You’ve made me pull the thread out o’ me needle.  Thread it now, you!”

Then Larry, with his quick eye and steady hand, would annoy her by threading it as deftly as she herself could have done, would possibly contribute some enormous stitches to the confection, and, by the time its construction was seriously resumed, the collaborators on the big sofa would have advanced a stage further on the road through the jungle, that had, with so much foresight and patience, been prepared for them.

Young Mr. Coppinger’s hopes and fears as to his prospects of becoming a Member of Parliament varied no more than was suitable in the possessor of the artistic temperament, but Barty, his agent in chief, maintained an attitude of unbroken pessimism.  That whisper of the secret and late-declared antagonism of the Church had reached him, and in the secure seclusion of his own office he inveighed against clerical interference with all the fierceness of a dog chained in his kennel, who knows that his adversaries are as unable to touch him as he is to injure them.  Only, in Barry’s case, he was quite sure that his barkings were unheard, and he would have been exceedingly alarmed had he thought otherwise.

“I declare to God I don’t care what way it goes!” Larry had said many times, but most often when fatigue and discouragement had together taken control.

Such times had come more often during the last week Before the election, and they reached their climax on the evening of the polling day.  The two young men, mentally and physically demoralised by fatigue, had at length, at an hour considerably past midnight, escaped from their colleagues, and, having gained the sanctuary of Barty’s office, were drearily reviewing the position by the light of a smoky lamp and over the ashes of a dead fire; counting possible votes, making unconvincing calculations based on supposition, wading hand-in-hand ever deeper into the Slough of Despond.

“I was talking to your father this evening,” said Larry, lighting a cigarette and letting himself fall into an ancient rocking-chair.  “He wouldn’t give me an opinion one way or the other, but it’s my belief he thinks it’s a bad chance.”