’You, Richie, the member for this borough of Chippenden, have won solid ground.  I guarantee it to you.  And you go straight from the hustings, or the first taste of parliamentary benches, to Sarkeld:  you take your grandad’s proposition to Prince Ernest:  you bring back the prince’s acceptance to the squire.  Can you hope to have a princess without a battle for her?’ More and much more in this strain, until—­for he could read me and most human beings swiftly on the surface, notwithstanding the pressure of his fancifulness—­he perceived that talking influenced me far less than activity, and so after a hurried breakfast and an innocuous glance at the damp morning papers, we started to the money-lender’s, with Jennings to lend his name.  We were in Chippenden close upon the hour my father had named, bringing to the startled electors the first news of their member’s death.

During the heat of the canvass for votes I received a kind letter from the squire in reply to one of mine, wherein he congratulated me on my prospects of success, and wound up:  ’Glad to see it announced you are off with that princess of yours.  Show them we are as proud as they are, Harry, and a fig for the whole foreign lot!  Come to Riversley soon, and be happy.’  What did that mean?  Heriot likewise said in a letter:  ’So it’s over?  The proud prince kicks?  You will not thank me for telling you now what you know I think about it.’  I appealed to my father.  ‘Canvass! canvass!’ cried he; and he persistently baffled me.  It was from Temple I learnt that on the day of our starting for Chippenden, the newspapers contained a paragraph in large print flatly denying upon authority that there was any foundation for the report of an intended marriage between the Princess of Eppenwelzen-Sarkeld and an English gentleman.  Then I remembered how that morning my father had flung the papers down, complaining of their dampness.

Would such denial have appeared without Ottilia’s sanction?

My father proved that I was harnessed to him; there was no stopping, no time for grieving.  Pace was his specific.  He dragged me the round of the voters; he gave dinners at the inn of true Liberals, and ate of them contentedly; he delivered speeches incessantly.  The whole force of his. serio-comic genius was alive in its element at Chippenden.  From balls and dinners, and a sharp contest to maintain his position in town, he was down among us by the first morning train, bright as Apollo, and quite the sun of the place, dazzling the independent electors and their wives, and even me somewhat; amazing me, certainly.  Dettermain, his lawyer, who had never seen him in action, and supposed he would treat an election as he did his Case, with fits and starts of energy, was not less astonished, and tried to curb him.

’Mr. Dettermain, my dear sir, I apprehend it is the electoral maxim to woo the widowed borough with the tear in its eye, and I shall do so hotly, in a right masculine manner,’ my father said.  ’We have the start; and if we beat the enemy by nothing else we will beat him by constitution.  We are the first in the field, and not to reap it is to acknowledge oneself deficient in the very first instrument with which grass was cut.’