He drove off.  She entered the house, and, flinging herself on the floor by Barney Bill, buried her head on the old man’s knees and sobbed her brave heart out.

CHAPTER XXII

The next morning amazement fluttered over a million breakfast tables and throbbed in a million railway carriages.  For all the fierceness of political passions, parliamentary elections are but sombre occurrences to the general public.  Rarely are they attended by the picturesque, the dramatic, the tragic.  But already the dramatic had touched the election of Hickney Heath, stimulating interest in the result.  Thousands, usually apathetic as to political matters, opened their newspapers to see how the ex-convict candidate had fared.  They read, with a gasp, that he was dead; that his successful opponent had proclaimed himself to be his son.  They had the dramatic value of cumulative effect.  If Paul had ever sought notoriety he had it now.  His name rang through the length and breadth of the land.  The early editions of the London afternoon papers swelled the chorus of amazed comment and conjecture.  Some had even routed out a fact or two, Heaven knows whence, concerning father and son.  According to party they meted out praise or blame.  Some, unversed in the law, declared the election invalid.  The point was discussed in a hundred clubs.

There was consternation in the social world.  The Duchesses’ boudoirs with which Paul had been taunted hummed with indignation.  They had entertained an adventurer unawares.  They had entrusted the sacred ark of their political hopes to a charlatan.  Their daughters had danced with the offspring of gaol and gutter.  He must be cast out from the midst of them.  So did those that were foolish furiously rage together and imagine many a vain thing.  The Winwoods came in for pity.  They had been villainously imposed upon.  And the Young England League to which they had all subscribed so handsomely—­ where were its funds?  Was it safe to leave them at the disposal of so unprincipled a fellow?  Then germs of stories crept in from the studios and the stage and grew perversely in the overheated atmosphere.  Paul’s reputation began to assume a pretty colour.  On the other hand, there were those who, while deploring the deception, were impressed by the tragedy and by Paul’s attitude.  He had his defenders.  Among the latter first sprang forward Lord Francis Ayres, the Chief Whip, officially bound to protect his own pet candidate.

He called early at the house in Portland Place, a distressed and anxious man.  The door was besieged by reporters from newspapers, vainly trying to gain, entrance.  His arrival created a sensation.  At any Tate there was a headline “Opposition Whip calls on Savelli.”  One or two attempted to interview him on the doorstep.  He excused himself courteously.  As-yet he knew as much or as little as they.  The door opened.  The butler snatched him in hurriedly.  He asked to see the Winwoods.  He found them in the library.