There were circles in Dunfield in which another and quite a different myth grew up around the name of Emily Hood.  The Cartwrights originated it.  They too had received a mysterious note of farewell, and their interpretation was this Emily, they held, had gone to London, there to be happily married to a certain Mr. Athel, a gentleman of aristocratic appearance and enormously wealthy.  Mrs. Baxendale heard this story now and again; she neither affirmed nor contradicted.  Jessie Cartwright reflected much on Emily’s slyness in keeping her affairs so secret.  She was not as envious as she would have been but for a certain compact which she was determined should not—­if it lay in her power to prevent it—­be some day laughed away as a mere joke.  And had she not received, on the very eve of Dagworthy’s departure, a box of gloves, which could only come from one person?

The second myth holds its ground, I believe, to the present day.  The more mischievous fable was refuted before very long, but only when it had borne results for Wilfrid practically the same as if it had been a truth.

CHAPTER XX

WILFRID THE LEGISLATOR

Let time and change do their work for six years and six months, their building and their destroying, their ripening for love, their ripening for death.  Then we take our way to the Capital, for, behold, it is mid-season; the sun of late June is warm upon the many-charioted streets, upon the parks where fashion’s progress circles to the ’Io Triumphe’ of regardant throngs, even upon the quarters where life knows but one perennial season, that of toil.  The air is voiceful; every house which boasts a drawing-room gathers its five o’clock choir; every theatre, every concert-room resounds beneath the summer night; in the halls of Westminster is the culmination of sustained utterance.  There, last night, the young member for a Surrey borough made his maiden speech; his name, Mr. Wilfrid Athel.

The speech was better reported than such are wont to be, for it contained clever things, and quite surprisingly resembled in its tone of easy confidence and its mastery of relevant facts the deliverances of men of weight in politics.  It had elicited a compliment from a leader of the opposing party; it had occasioned raisings of the eyebrows in capable judges, and had led to remarks that a young man so singularly self-possessed, so agreeably oracular, so remarkably long-headed, might be expected, in the course of some five-and-twenty years, to go far.  He was, to be sure, a child—­not yet thirty—­but there were older children in the House decidedly of less promise.  Mr. Wilfrid Athel might go home, and, if he could, go to sleep, in the assurance that his career had opened.

The next day, a Saturday, this finished little piece of talk was the starting-point of a vast amount of less coherent speech in a drawing-room within sight of Kensington’s verdure.  Here Mrs. Ashley Birks did her friends the honour of receiving them; a lady well regarded in certain discriminating circles.  A widow formerly, she had now been two years married to a barrister new in silk.  We have the pleasure of knowing her; for she once bore the name of Mrs. Rossall.