Ashe sat to the speaker’s right, outwardly attentive, inwardly ashamed of his party and his chief.  He himself belonged to a new generation, for whom formulae that had satisfied their fathers were empty and dead.  But with these formulas Lord Parham was stuffed.  A man of average intriguing ability, he had been raised, at a moment of transition, to the place he held, by a consummate command of all the meaner arts of compromise and management, no less than by an invaluable power of playing to the gallery.  He led a party who despised him—­and he complacently imagined that he was the party.  His speech on this occasion bristled with himself, and had, in truth, no other substance; the I’s swarmed out upon the audience like wasps.

Ashe groaned in spirit, “We have the ideas,” he thought, “but they are damned little good to us—­it is the Tories who have the men!  Ye gods! must we all talk like this at last?"...

Suddenly, on the other side of the platform, behind Lord Parham, he noticed that Kitty and Eddie Helston were exchanging signs.  Kitty drew out a tablet, wrote upon it, and, leaning over some white-frocked children of the Lord Lieutenant who sat behind her, handed the torn leaf to Helston.  But from some clumsiness he let it drop; at the moment a door opened at the back of the platform, and the leaf, caught by the draught, was blown back across the bench where Kitty and the house-party were sitting, and fluttered down to a resting-place on the piece of red baize wheron Lord Parham was standing—­close beside his left foot.

Ashe saw Kitty’s start of dismay, her scarlet flush, her involuntary movement.  But Lord Parham had started on his peroration.  The rustics gaped, the gentry sat expressionless, the reporters toiled after the great man.  Kitty all the time kept her eyes fixed on the little white paper; Ashe no less.  Between him and Lord Parham there was first the Lord Lieutenant, a portly man, very blind and extremely deaf—­then a table with a Liberal peer behind it for chairman.

Lord Parham had resumed his seat.  The tent was shaken with cheers, and the smiling chairman had risen.

“Can you ask Lord Parham to hand me on that paper on the floor,” said Ashe, in the ear of the Lord Lieutenant, “it seems to have dropped from my portfolio.”

The Lord Lieutenant, bending backward behind the chairman as the next speaker rose, tried to attract Lord Parham’s attention.  Eddie Helston was, at the same time, endeavoring to make his way forward through the crowded seats behind the Prime Minister.

Meanwhile Lord Parham had perceived the paper, raised it, and adjusted his spectacles.  He thought it was a communication from the audience—­a question, perhaps, that he was expected to answer.

“Lord Parham!” cried the Lord Lieutenant again, “would you—­”

“Silence, please!  Speak up!”—­from the audience, who had so far failed to catch a word of what the new speaker was saying.