The chairman was popular with all parties, and the Sheep’s opening words of complimentary recognition received a round of applause.  The orator smiled expansively on his listeners and seized the opportunity to add a few words of political wisdom on his own account.  People looked at the clock or began to grope for umbrellas and discarded neckwraps.  Then, in the midst of a string of meaningless platitudes, the Sheep delivered himself of one of those blundering remarks which travel from one end of a constituency to the other in half an hour, and are seized on by the other side as being more potent on their behalf than a ton of election literature.  There was a general shuffling and muttering across the length and breadth of the hall, and a few hisses made themselves heard.  The Sheep tried to whittle down his remark, and the chairman unhesitatingly threw him over in his speech of thanks, but the damage was done.

“I’m afraid I lost touch with the audience rather over that remark,” said the Sheep afterwards, with his apologetic smile abnormally developed.

“You lost us the election,” said the chairman, and he proved a true prophet.

A month or so of winter sport seemed a desirable pick-me-up after the strenuous work and crowning discomfiture of the election.  Rupert and Kathleen hied them away to a small Alpine resort that was just coming into prominence, and thither the Sheep followed them in due course, in his role of husband-elect.  The wedding had been fixed for the end of March.

It was a winter of early and unseasonable thaws, and the far end of the local lake, at a spot where swift currents flowed into it, was decorated with notices, written in three languages, warning skaters not to venture over certain unsafe patches.  The folly of approaching too near these danger spots seemed to have a natural fascination for the Sheep.

“I don’t see what possible danger there can be,” he protested, with his inevitable smile, when Rupert beckoned him away from the proscribed area; “the milk that I put out on my window-sill last night was frozen an inch deep.”

“It hadn’t got a strong current flowing through it,” said Rupert; “in any case, there is not much sense in hovering round a doubtful piece of ice when there are acres of good ice to skate over.  The secretary of the ice-committee has warned you once already.”

A few minutes later Rupert heard a loud squeal of fear, and saw a dark spot blotting the smoothness of the lake’s frozen surface.  The Sheep was struggling helplessly in an ice-hole of his own making.  Rupert gave one loud curse, and then dashed full tilt for the shore; outside a low stable building on the lake’s edge he remembered having seen a ladder.  If he could slide it across the ice-hole before the Sheep went under the rescue would be comparatively simple work.  Other skaters were dashing up from a distance, and, with the ladder’s help, they could get him out of his death-trap without