Mrs. Nevill Tyson hesitated.  “N-no.  Not much.”

“What did he say!”

“Oh—­I think—­he only said it was rather a pity you’d mixed yourself up with it.”

“Damn his impertinence!”

He flicked the card with a disdainful fingernail and followed his wife into the drawing-room.  She gave him some tea to keep him quiet; he drank it in passionate gulps.  Then he felt better, and lay back in his chair biting his mustache meditatively.

“By the way, did Morley say whether he’d support Ringwood!  The fellow’s a publican, likewise a sinner, but we must rush him in for the District Council.”

“Why?” asked Mrs. Nevill Tyson, trying hard to be interested.

“Why?  To keep that radical devil out, of course; a cad that spits on his Bible, and would do the same for his Queen’s face any day—­if he got the chance, I’d like to sound Morley, though.”  A smile flickered on his lips, as he anticipated the important interview.

“Oh, he did say something about it.  I remember now.  I think he’s going to vote for the Smedley man.”

Tyson’s smile went out suddenly.  He was scowling now.  Not that he cared a straw which way the elections went, but he liked to “mix himself up” in them to give himself local color; and now it seemed that he had taken the wrong shade.  He had spent the better part of six weeks in badgering and bullying Sir Peter’s pet candidate.

“Morley’s a miserable time-server,” said he savagely.  “I suppose the usual excuses for his wife’s not calling?”

“Neuralgia,” said Mrs. Nevill Tyson, with a grin.

“Neur_al_gia!  Why couldn’t he give her a stomach-ache for a change?”

Now, when Tyson expressed his opinion of Sir Peter with such delightful frankness, both he and Mrs. Nevill had overlooked the trifling fact that Pinker, the footman, while to all outward appearance absorbed in emptying a coal-scuttle, was listening with all his ears.  Pinker was an intelligent fellow, interested in local politics, still more interested in the affairs of his master and mistress.  The dust upon those visiting-cards had provided Pinker with much matter for reflection.  Now men will say anything in the passion of elections; but when it was reported that Mr. Nevill Tyson had in private pronounced Sir Peter to be a “miserable time-server,” and in public (that is to say, in Drayton Town Hall) declared excitedly—­“We will have no time-servers—­men who will go through any gate you open for them—­we Leicestershire people want a man who rides straight across country, and doesn’t funk his fences!” And when Sir Peter remarked that “no doubt Mr. Tyson had taken some nasty ones in his time,” everybody knew that there was something more behind all this than mere party feeling.  Sir Peter was right:  that electioneering business was Tyson’s third great mistake.  It proved, what nobody would have been very much aware of, that Nevill Tyson, Esquire,