“We shall know all about that soon, Bunce.”

“If you don’t get another seat, Mr. Finn, I suppose we shall see you back at the Inn.  I hope we may.  It’s better than being member for Loughton, Mr. Finn;—­you may be sure of that.”  And then Mr. Bunce passed on.

Mr. Turnbull carried his clause, and Loughton was doomed.  Loughton and the other six deadly sins were anathematized, exorcised, and finally got rid of out of the world by the voices of the gentlemen who had been proclaiming the beauty of such pleasant vices all their lives, and who in their hearts hated all changes that tended towards popular representation.  But not the less was Mr. Mildmay beaten; and, in accordance with the promise made by his first lieutenant immediately after the vote was taken, the Prime Minister came forward on the next evening and made his statement.  He had already put his resignation into the hands of Her Majesty, and Her Majesty had graciously accepted it.  He was very old, and felt that the time had come in which it behoved him to retire into that leisure which he thought he had, perhaps, earned.  He had hoped to carry this bill as the last act of his political life; but he was too old, too stiff, as he said, in his prejudices, to bend further than he had bent already, and he must leave the completion of the matter in other hands.  Her Majesty had sent for Mr. Gresham, and Mr. Gresham had already seen Her Majesty.  Mr. Gresham and his other colleagues, though they dissented from the clause which had been carried by the united efforts of gentlemen opposite to him, and of gentlemen below him on his own side of the House, were younger men than he, and would, for the country’s sake,—­and for the sake of Her Majesty,—­endeavour to carry the bill through.  There would then, of course, be a dissolution, and the future Government would, no doubt, depend on the choice of the country.  From all which it was understood that Mr. Gresham was to go on with the bill to a conclusion, whatever might be the divisions carried against him, and that a new Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs must be chosen.  Phineas understood, also, that he had lost his seat at Loughton.  For the borough of Loughton there would never again be an election.  “If I had been Mr. Mildmay, I would have thrown the bill up altogether,” Lord Brentford said afterwards; “but of course it was not for me to interfere.”

The session was protracted for two months after that,—­beyond the time at which grouse should have been shot,—­and by the 23rd of August became the law of the land.  “I shall never get over it,” said Mr. Ratler to Mr. Finn, seated one terribly hot evening on a bench behind the Cabinet Ministers,—­“never.  I don’t suppose such a session for work was ever known before.  Think what it is to have to keep men together in August, with the thermometer at 81 degress, and the river stinking like,—­like the very mischief.”  Mr. Ratler, however, did not die.