had next to no standing in the county.  As a public man he was worse off than he would have been as a harmless private individual.  He could never have been found out if he had only stayed quietly at home and devoted himself to the cultivation of orchids, in the manner of old Tyson, who had managed to hoodwink himself and his neighbors into the belief that he was a country gentleman.  As it was, for such a clever fellow Tyson had displayed stupidity that was almost ridiculous.  For nobody ever denied that he was a clever fellow, that he could have been anything that he liked; in fact, he had been most things already.  Anything he liked—­except a country gentleman.  The country gentleman, like the poet, is born, not made; and it was a question if Tyson had ever been a gentleman at all.  He had all the accidents of the thing, but not its substance, its British stability and reserve.  Civilization was rubbing off him at the edges; he seemed to be struggling against some primeval tendency.  You expected at any moment to see a reversion to some earlier and uglier type.  Across the chastened accents of the journalist there sounded the wild intemperate tongue of the man of the people.  Miss Batchelor used to declare that Tyson was a self-made man, because he was constructed on such eccentric principles.  His slightest movements showed that he was uncertain of his ground, and ready to fight you for it, if it came to that.  And now he still met you with the twinkle in his small blue eyes, but there was a calculating light behind it, as if he were measuring his forces against yours.  And you were sorry for him in spite of yourself.  With the spirit of the soldier of Fortune, Tyson had the nerves and temper of her spoilt child.  He had made an open bid for popularity and failed, and it was positively painful to see him writhing under the consciousness of his failure.

And the cause of it all was Mrs. Nevill Tyson.  Yet he was proud of her still; proud even of the notoriety which was a tribute to her beauty.  To tell the truth, her notoriety was his protection.  Once the elections were over, gossip was too busy with the wife to pay much attention to the husband.  He was considered to have extinguished himself for good.  Miss Batchelor no longer regretted that he had no profession.  To be the husband of the loveliest woman in Leicestershire was profession enough for any man.

By a further social paradox, Mrs. Nevill Tyson owed much of her present notoriety to her former obscurity.  Lady Morley, had her temperament permitted, might have been as frisky or as risky as she pleased, without attracting unkind attention, much less censure.  But, unless she combined the virtue of an angel with the manners of a district visitor, and contrived to walk circumspectly across the quicksands that separated her from “good society,” a daughter of Mrs. Wilcox was condemned already.  Mrs. Nevill Tyson had never walked circumspectly in her life.  And Fate, that follows on the footsteps of the fool, was waiting, if not to catch Mrs. Nevill Tyson tripping, at any rate to prove that she must trip.