Next day her father tossed her a photograph of another gentleman, coming out of a letter he had received from old Mrs. Beauchamp.  He asked her opinion of it.  She said, ’I think he would have suited Bevisham better than Captain Baskelett.’  Of the original, who presented himself at Mount Laurels in the course of the week, she had nothing to say, except that he was very like the photograph, very unlike Nevil Beauchamp.  ’Yes, there I’m of your opinion,’ her father observed.  The gentleman was Mr. Blackburn Tuckham, and it was amusing to find an exuberant Tory in one who was the reverse of the cavalier type.  Nevil and he seemed to have been sorted to the wrong sides.  Mr. Tuckham had a round head, square flat forehead, and ruddy face; he stood as if his feet claimed the earth under them for his own, with a certain shortness of leg that detracted from the majesty of his resemblance to our Eighth Harry, but increased his air of solidity; and he was authoritative in speaking.  ’Let me set you right, sir,’ he said sometimes to Colonel Halkett, and that was his modesty.  ‘You are altogether wrong,’ Miss Halkett heard herself informed, which was his courtesy.  He examined some of her water-colour drawings before sitting down to dinner, approved of them, but thought it necessary to lay a broad finger on them to show their defects.  On the question of politics, ‘I venture to state,’ he remarked, in anything but the tone of a venture, ’that no educated man of ordinary sense who has visited our colonies will come back a Liberal.’  As for a man of sense and education being a Radical, he scouted the notion with a pooh sufficient to awaken a vessel in the doldrums.  He said carelessly of Commander Beauchamp, that he might think himself one.  Either the Radical candidate for Bevisham stood self-deceived, or—­the other supposition.  Mr. Tuckham would venture to state that no English gentleman, exempt from an examination by order of the Commissioners of Lunacy, could be sincerely a Radical.  ’Not a bit of it; nonsense,’ he replied to Miss Halkett’s hint at the existence of Radical views; ’that is, those views are out of politics; they are matters for the police.  Dutch dykes are built to shut away the sea from cultivated land, and of course it’s a part of the business of the Dutch Government to keep up the dykes,—­and of ours to guard against the mob; but that is only a political consideration after the mob has been allowed to undermine our defences.’

‘They speak,’ said Miss Halkett, ‘of educating the people to fit them—­’

‘They speak of commanding the winds and tides,’ he cut her short, with no clear analogy; ’wait till we have a storm.  It’s a delusion amounting to dementedness to suppose, that with the people inside our defences, we can be taming them and tricking them.  As for sending them to school after giving them power, it’s like asking a wild beast to sit down to dinner with us—­he wants the whole table and us too.  The best education for the people is government.  They’re beginning to see that in Lancashire at last.  I ran down to Lancashire for a couple of days on my landing, and I’m thankful to say Lancashire is preparing to take a step back.  Lancashire leads the country.  Lancashire men see what this Liberalism has done for the Labour-market.’