‘I should think so!’ Then pausing, he added, with condescending good-nature, ’Well, Fitzjocelyn, I seem to you a terrible old flint-stone, but I can’t help that.  There are considerations besides true love, you know; and for these young people, they can’t have pined out their hearts yet, as, by your own showing, they have not been engaged three months.  If it were Sydney himself, I should tell him that love is all the better for keeping—­if it is good for anything; and where there is such a disparity, it ought, above all, to be tested by waiting.  So tell Master Jem, with my best wishes, to take care of his grandmother.  I shall think myself doing him a kindness in keeping him out of the school, if it is to hinder him from marrying at four-and-twenty, and a girl brought up as she has been!’

‘And, Mr. Calcott,’ said Louis, rising, ’you will excuse my viewing my cousin’s engagement as an additional motive for doing my utmost to promote his success in obtaining a situation, for which I consider him as eminently fitted.  Good morning, sir.’

‘Good morning, my Lord.’

Lord Fitzjocelyn departed so grave, so courteous, so dignified, so resolute, so comically like his father, that the old Squire threw himself back in his chair and laughed heartily.  The magnificent challenge of war to the knife, was no more to him than the adjuration he had heard last year in the justice-room; and he no more expected these two lads to make any effectual opposition than he did to see them repeal the game-laws.

The Viscount meanwhile rode off thoroughly roused to indignation.  The good sense of sixty naturally fell hard and cold on the ears of twenty-two, and it was one of the moments when counsel inflamed instead of checking him.  Never angry on his own account, he could be exceedingly wrathful for others; and the unlucky word, disparity, drove him especially wild.  In mere charity, he thought it right to withhold this insult to the Pendragons from his cousin’s ears; but this very reserve seemed to bind him to resent it in James’s stead; and he was far more blindly impetuous than if, as usual, he had seen James so vehement that he was obliged to try to curb and restrain him.

He would not hear of giving in!  When the Ramsbotham candidate appeared, and James scrupled to divide the contrary interest, Louis laid the whole blame of the split upon Mr. Calcott; while, as to poor Mr. Powell, no words were compassionate enough for his dull, slouching, ungentlemanly air; and he was pronounced to be an old writing-master, fit for nothing but to mend pens.

But Mr. Walby’s was still their sole promise.  The grocer followed the Squire; the bookseller was liberal, and had invited the Ramsbotham candidate to dinner.  On this alarming symptom, Fitzjocelyn fell upon Richardson, and talked, and talked, and talked, till the solicitor could either bear it no longer, or feared for the Ormersfield agency, and his vote was carried off as a captive.